ACLU sues NSA

"This just in, and I think it's very exciting: in honor of Martin Luther King Jr Day, the FBI has just announced that, just for today, they're going to spy on all Americans." Jon Stewart, on the Daily Show (1/16/06)

So, it seems that the FBI has actually been quite disgruntled with the NSA policy of widespread domestic surveillance and the vast quantity of pointless post-9/11 leads that the Agency was required to follow up on, which have led to "dead-ends or innocent Americans." In today's New York Times article, an unamed official noted that FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III has raised questions about "the legal rationale for a program of eavesdropping without warrants."

We at the ACLU have a few questions about this as well, as do Greenpeace, Council on American-Islamic Relations and five journalists and scholars

"who frequently communicate by phone and e-mail with people in the Middle East [and] believe their communications are being intercepted by the NSA under the spying program."

These organizations are the named plaintiffs in the ACLU's suit against the NSA, which was announced today and is profiled in another New York Times article. The Center for Constitutional Rights has also announced that they're bringing a suit against the NSA, on behalf of "four lawyers at the center and a legal assistant there who work on terrorism-related cases at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and overseas."

Amy Laura in the Philadelphia office