Sen. Rand Paul Hits President Obama with Class Action Lawsuit Over NSA Data Collection

Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and the conservative group FreedomWorks Inc. have filed a class action lawsuit in a District of Columbia federal court against several top government officials, including President Barack Obama, alleging that the National Security Agency has violated the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution by illegally collecting and storing telephone data of American citizens.

The defendants included in the class action lawsuit are Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Director of the National Security Agency and Chief of the Central Security Service Keith Alexander, and Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation James Comey, Jr.

Paul and FreedomWorks are asking that the court declare the NSA program that allows the government to collect and monitor telephone data known as the Mass Associational Tracking Program as unconstitutional, that it forbid the government from continuing the program, and that it orders the NSA to purge all records obtained as part of the MATP.

In 2001, after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that happened that year, Congress passed the Patriot Act, which allows the FBI to apply for an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for permission “to obtain foreign intelligence information not concerning a United States person or to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.”

In 2006, Congress passed a provision which allowed the FBI to make requests for intelligence information when “a statement of facts showing that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the tangible things sought are relevant to an authorized investigation . . . to obtain foreign intelligence information not concerning a United States person or to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.”

Under the Mass Associational Tracking Program, all the major telecommunications companies have to give telephone metadata of all domestic and international phone calls to the NSA on a daily basis.

Paul argues that he and other potential Class Members’ data was collected even though is no reason to believe they are “connected with international terrorism.” He also asserts that he and the class members have “subjective expectations of privacy . . . which expectations society views as reasonable.”

“The NSA is only to access the metadata to further an international terrorism investigation, and only by querying the entire database with a telephone number or identifier that is associated with an NSA-suspected foreign terrorist organization on a list approved by the [Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court],” the class action lawsuit explains.

“Such queries may only take place after two NSA line personnel and one supervisor first decide that they believe there is ‘reasonable articulable suspicion’ that the seed is associated with an international terrorist organization on the FISC approved list.”

And these decisions do not require judicial oversight before the decision is made.

Identities of individuals can be revealed if they are cross-checked with public records. The type of information that can be revealed includes a person’s name, address, driver’s license, credit history, Social Security Number and more even more private data such as religious, political and ideological information.

According to Paul’s NSA lawsuit, the NSA’s tracking program “has not stopped or been instrumental in stopping even one imminent international terrorist attack, or otherwise assisted [government officials] in achieving any time-sensitive objective.”

He cites a government report on the program on Dec. 12, 2013 that “concluded that the Mass Associational Tracking Program ‘was not essential to preventing [terrorist] attacks and [the same information] could readily have been obtained in a timely manner using conventional . . . orders.”

The Kentucky Republican concludes that the Fourth Amendment rights of each U.S. citizen is violated “each time they gather, store or search plaintiffs’ . . . telephone metadata.”

“We believe that this lawsuit could conceivably represent hundreds of millions of people who have phone lines in this country,” Paul said. “We don’t do this out of disrespect to anyone. We do this out of respect for the Constitution, out of the belief that these decisions cannot be made in secret by a secret court but that they need to be made in open by the Supreme Court.”

One of the attorneys representing Paul and FreedomWorks is former Virginia Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli.

The plaintiffs are represented by Earl “Trey” Mayfield and Michael P. Lewis of The Lewis Firm PLLC and by Kenneth T. Cuccinelli of Cuccinelli & Associates LLC.

The NSA Class Action Lawsuit is Rand Paul, et al. v. Barack H. Obama, et al., in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The case number was not immediately available.