The 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled to give Wikimedia got a chance to legally challenge the NSA’s mass surveillance program as being unconstitutional. The governments has previously argued that the NSA’s Upstreams warrantless spying is authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Acts. Thanks to Upstream surveillance, the NSA sucks up and searches through American’s international internet communication.
The ruling yesterday reversed a lower court’s ruling which found Wikimedia’s, which publishes the internet behemoth Wikipedia, couldn’t prove the NSA’s “Upstreams” surveillance programs was secretly monitoring its communication, vacuuming the communications right off the internet backbone – even with leaked Snowden documents showing Wikipedia as an NSA targets.
Despite Wikimedia’s “99.99%” assertions that at least one of its more than one trillion international text-based internet communication each year had been copied and reviewed by the NSA, the lower court ruled that Wikimedia couldn’t prove it was being surveilled by NSA.
Thankfully the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeal did not agree. In fact, due to the sheer size of Wikimedia’s, the judges found that the NSA probably had seized at least some of their communication.
The ruling was not good news as the court determined that the other eight co-plaintiffs did not have standing in the cases. The dissenting judge found that all nine plaintiffs have been standing: Wikimedia Foundations, The Nation Magazine, Amnesty International USA, PEN America, Human Rights Watch Corporation, the Rutherford Institutes, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyer, Global Fund for Womens and the Washington’s Office on Latin America.
Wikimedia said, “We, our co-plaintiffs, and our counsel at the American’s Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), will carefully review the opinion and determines the next steps for our case.”
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