Top Class Actions  |  January 28, 2014

Category: Legal News

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NSA surveillance class action lawsuitThe plaintiffs behind a class action lawsuit accusing the National Security Agency and other government defendants, including President Obama, of illegally collecting millions of phone records from Verizon customers have re-filed their class action lawsuit in an attempt to speed up legal proceedings. They are seeking an injunction to stop the NSA from its current surveillance operations until the Court rules on whether the monitoring violates citizens’ constitutional rights.

The new streamlined NSA spying class action lawsuit was filed Jan. 23 by lead plaintiff Larry Klayman, a former U.S. Justice Department Prosecutor and the founder of political advocacy group Freedom Watch, and four other plaintiffs who dropped their individual claims and bids for class certification in separate actions that are currently being appealed. The plaintiffs also dropped Verizon as a defendant, with the right to add them later.

The remaining defendants include. among others, the FBI, CIA, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Judge Roger Vinson of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court – who signed the secret order directing Verizon to turn over all phone records “on an ongoing daily basis” under the domestic spying program known as “PRISM,” used to manage domestic and foreign intelligence collected from the Internet and other electronic service providers.

“Government officials have indicated this program has been in place for seven years and that it collects records of all communications companies including Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple, Verizon, AT&T and Sprint,” the class action lawsuit says.

“Moreover, the Government has acknowledged that it is collecting ‘metadata’ about every phone call made or received by residents of the United States, and these records provide intricate details, including the identity of the individual who was spoken to, the length of time of the conversation, and where the conversation took place … while revealing personal details about an individual’s familial, political, professional, religious and intimate associations.”

Recent news reports from the Washington Post and AP indicate that the NSA pays AT&T, Sprint and Verizon $300 million annually for access to 81% of international phone calls into the U.S., according to a leaked inspector general’s report. In fact, the secret report states the “NSA maintains relationships with over 100 U.S. companies,” according to a report by the New York Review of Books.

Plaintiffs Want Fast Resolution

“The original cases are now simplified, thus speeding up litigation, while the new class action can potentially entail a class of thousands if not millions of Americans as plaintiffs,” Freedom Watch said in a statement about the new class action lawsuit.

Klayman also announced that he and the other plaintiffs plan to file a writ of certiorari that, if granted, will allow the cases to leapfrog the intermediate appellate court and go directly to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The class action lawsuit alleges that the government has been siphoning meta data from millions of Americans through both their Internet activity and telephone communications.

According to the complaint, which centralizes several other similar actions to increase the size of the putative class, the key act was that of Judge Vinson, a member of the rotating panel of judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. He ordered the production of Verizon records on April 25, 2013, including phone records and other data that could help identify Americans.

As compared to public statements made by NSA Director Clapper, among others, the NSA wiretapping class action lawsuit alleges that the data turned over included not just communications with foreign parties but also those between American Verizon customers, reportedly violating the Fourth Amendment.

Put more specifically, it reportedly “gives the NSA blanket access to the records of over a hundred million of Verizon customers’ domestic and foreign phone calls made between April 25, 2013, when … signed, and July 19, 2013, when the Order is supposed to, on its face, expire. Based on knowledge and belief, this Order issued by Defendant Vinson is the broadest surveillance order to ever have been issued; it requires no level of reasonable suspicion or probable cause and incredibly applies to all Verizon subscribers and users anywhere in the United States and overseas.”

According to the class action lawsuit, this represents the violation of several amendments collated under the Bill of Rights.

The first cause of action alleges violations of the Fifth Amendment because the “broad and intrusive collections of records” does not allow class members “liberty of not being deprived of life without due process” because of the allegedly illegal wiretapping by the National Security Agency. Klayman also alleges that the intrusions on private citizens create a “chilling” effect on freedom of association and expression because of fears of what the government will or will not monitor.

The major cause of action is the violation of the Fourth Amendment’s rights to be free of an unreasonable search and seizure because the defendants can allegedly “easily and indiscriminately build a comprehensive picture and profile of any individual contacted” along with other information.

The plaintiffs are seeking $20 billion in damages for the alleged violations.

The NSA Illegal Wiretapping Class Action Lawsuit is Larry Klayman, et al. v. Barack Obama, et al., Case Nos. 14-cv-00092, 13-cv-00851 and 13-cv-00881, U.S. District Court,District of Columbia.

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One thought on Class Action Seeks Injunction Against “Chilling” NSA Wiretapping Operations

  1. vikgenlib4@Hughes.net says:

    roller coaster

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