The Washington Post | By: Rachel Weiner | May 23 at 3:38 PM:
A lawsuit challenging electronic surveillance by the National Security Agency will go forward, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.
Wikimedia can now make the case that the NSA is unconstitutionally spying on Americans though a program called “Upstream” — collecting communications as they travel in or out of the country through the main cables of the Internet.
“Wikimedia has plausibly alleged that its communications travel all of the roads that a communication can take, and that the NSA seizes all of the communications along at least one of those roads,” wrote a three-judge panel of the Richmond-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit. “Thus, at least at this stage of the litigation, Wikimedia has standing to sue for a violation of the Fourth Amendment. And, because Wikimedia has self-censored its speech and sometimes forgone electronic communications in response to Upstream surveillance, it also has standing to sue for a violation of the First Amendment.”
The ruling revives a lawsuit that had been killed by a federal judge in Maryland, who had ruled that Wikimedia could not prove when the surveillance was taking place and so had not convinced the judge that it should be allowed to sue over possible harm.
Because Wikimedia engages in over a trillion international communications a year with individuals in virtually every country on earth, the appeals judges ruled, it is plausible to conclude that some of those communications have been collected by the NSA.
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