The first legal challenge to the recently revealed National Security Agency's gathering of phone records began on Tuesday as the American Civil Liberties Union filed a law suit against the Obama administration, according to The New York Times.
The ACLU is arguing that the NSA's policy, once secret until former contractor Edward Snowden revealed it to the Guardian last week, of collecting phone logs for millions of Americans is illegal and that the NSA should be required to not only stop the practice but also have the records that it has already gathered removed, according to The New York Times.
In the lawsuit the ACLU says that the NSA 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."
The complaint goes on to argue that the revelation of the NSA's broad surveillance program "is likely to have a chilling effect on whistle-blowers."
This is far from the first time that the ACLU has issued a legal challenge to the NSA. The ACLU frequently helps individuals who are attempting to challenge NSA policy but the government usually convinces courts to dismiss the cases by arguing that the litigation over said policies would reveal classified information, according to The New York Times.
What makes this potential case different is that the government has already declassified the existence of the call logging program. Also lending more credence to the case is the Verizon connection; the NSA obtained Verizon's call records and the ACLU happens to be a customer of Verizon, giving them a reason to bring the suit, reports The New York Times.
One of the authors of the Patriot Act, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., wrote in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder that he believes the NSA overstepped the authority they were given by the Patriot Act.
"The administration claims authority to sift through details of our private lives because the Patriot Act says that it can," the letter said. "I disagree. I authored the Patriot Act, and this is an abuse of that law."
Sources familiar with the NSA have told The Wall Street Journal that the NSA did not only receive call data from Verizon, but also from the other two largest phone companies, AT&T and Sprint. By covering those three companies every call made by the majority of Americans would be on record with the NSA.
In a statement released by the ACLU Jameel Jaffer, the group's deputy legal director, claims that the surveillance program set up by the NSA is the most extensive to ever occur in a democratic country.
"This dragnet program is surely one of the largest surveillance efforts ever launched by a democratic government against its own citizens. It is the equivalent of requiring every American to file a daily report with the government of every location they visited, every person they talked to on the phone, the time of each call, and the length of every conversation. The program goes far beyond even the permissive limits set by the Patriot Act and represents a gross infringement of the freedom of association and the right to privacy."
Timothy Edgar, a former government employee specializing in matters of privacy and civil liberties, spoke with The New York Times and explained that privacy was not invaded by collecting and storing the phone records, privacy is only invaded if a human opens and inspects the record.
"When you have important reasons why that collection needs to take place on a scale that is much larger than case-by-case or individual obtaining of records, then one of the ways you try to deal with the privacy issue is you think carefully about having a set of safeguards that basically say 'OK, yes, this has major privacy implications, but what can we do on the back end to address those?'" Edgar said.
