NSA Sued by ACLU Over Surveillance Programs Abroad; Civil Liberties Groups Demand Information on Stockpile of Data

Civil liberties groups are taking the United States government to court over the National Security Agency and its surveillance programs abroad.

The American Civil Liberties Union is suing the government, in hopes of revealing what the NSA does with American citizens' data once the surveillance agency has gotten a hold of it.

Yale University's Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic filed the lawsuit with the civil liberties organization, the BBC reported. The suit seeks to find out about the "vast quantities" of information that the NSA has been amassing for years, and also urges the court to order the government to hand over the specifics of the international surveillance program.

ACLU staff attorney Alex Abdo wrote in a blog post that it was "inevitable" that the American peoples' data would become fair game for information included in the overseas information report.

"We now know too well that unchecked surveillance authority can lead to dangerous overreach," Abdo wrote online.

Privacy activist Jacob Applebaum recently publicized some details of NSA surveillance programs that targeted hardware, according to the BBC.

Applebaum gave a speech during the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg in which he spoke on the NSA's ability to grab information from products by Dell, Apple, HP, Cisco, Huawei and Juniper.

"Basically their goal is to have total surveillance of everything that they are interested in," the BBC reported Applebaum as saying during the conference.

The civil liberties groups' suit comes three days after New York District Judge William Pauley dismissed a previous lawsuit filed by the ACLU in June 2013. The judge ruled that an unrelated NSA surveillance program operated along proper legal channels.