Ride the Lightning

ACLU Sues Obama Over Collection of Phone Records

June 12, 2013

The New York Times reported that the American Civil Liberties Union sued the Obama administration yesterday over its “dragnet” collection of logs of domestic phone calls, alleging that the program is illegal and asking a judge to order the collection stopped and records purged. It seems likely to me that this case will wend its way to the Supreme Court.

The complaint alleges that the program “gives the government a comprehensive record of our associations and public movements, revealing a wealth of detail about our familial, political, professional, religious and intimate associations,” adding that it “is likely to have a chilling effect on whistle-blowers and others who would otherwise contact” the ACLU for legal assistance.

In previous lawsuits that bear some similarity, the government has successfully argued that the courts should dismiss the suits without ruling on the merits because the litigation would reveal state secrets or that plaintiffs could not prove they were personally affected and thus lacked standing.

But this is a horse of a different color. For one thing, the government has now declassified the existence of the program. And the ACLU is a Verizon customer, Verizon having received a secret court order for all domestic calling records – that is said to provide standing.

The call logging program keeps a record of “metadata” from domestic phone calls, including which numbers were dialed and received, from which location, and the time and duration.      

Even one of the authors of the Patriot Act, Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. has said, "I authored the Patriot Act, and this is an abuse of that law.”      

Over the weekend, James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, said that officials may access the database only if they can meet a legal justification — “reasonable suspicion, based on specific facts, that the particular basis for the query is associated with a foreign terrorist organization.” Queries are audited under the oversight of the national security court. The government's argument is that people’s privacy is not invaded by having their records collected, but only when a human examines them.

I don't buy it. We can no longer pick up a phone without a record of that call accessible to the federal government. Moreover, as the article points out, history has shown that new government powers granted for one purpose often end up applied to others. Treacherous waters for the Fourth Amendment – I hope the courts will act to revive our rights under that Amendment.