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PICTURED: The NSA headquarters building at Fort Meade, Maryland.
A U.S. court has upheld a three year-old dismissal of a lawsuit filed by the Wikimedia Foundation against the National Security Agency (NSA) over alleged breaches of the Constitution related to the latter’s mass data collection.
The split-ruling from the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals was made on Wednesday after the government invoked nothing other than the “state secrets privilege”.
The decision comes five years after the Wikipedia parent non-profit found that the NSA’s “Upstream” data collection had intercepted a variety of its international communications. Wiki felt this was a breach of the First Amendment protection on speech and the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.
“By tapping the backbone of the Internet, the NSA is straining the backbone of democracy,” Lila Tretikov, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, wrote in a blog post on its website, according to Al Jazeera at the time.
“Wikipedia is founded on the freedoms of expression, inquiry, and information. By violating our users’ privacy, the NSA is threatening the intellectual freedom that is central to people’s ability to create and understand knowledge”.
Judge Albert Diaz ruled against Wikipedia, and said only that “the state secrets privilege requires the termination of this suit”.
Al Jazeera also noted the dissent of Judge Diana Gribbon Motz, who warned that the majority opinion “stands for a sweeping proposition: A suit may be dismissed under the state secrets doctrine, after minimal judicial review, even when the government premises its only defenses on far-fetched hypotheticals”.
The suit also included as plaintiffs: The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International USA, PEN American Center, Global Fund for Women, The Nation Magazine, The Rutherford Institute, and The Washington Office on Latin America, all of whom judged that their communications were being taken and likely stored by the Upstream program, revealed to the public by former-NSA contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The case was originally thrown out in 2015, when a lower court ruled that the plaintiffs lacked standing, having not provided enough evidence that their data had been seized. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) appealed the 4th Circuit Court and won, leading to the repeat dismissal on Thursday.
“The NSA intercepts and copies private communications in bulk while they are in transit, and then searches their contents using tens of thousands of keywords associated with NSA targets,” wrote the ACLU at the time. “These targets, chosen by intelligence analysts, are never approved by any court, and the limitations that do exist are weak and riddled with exceptions”.
Wikipedia said in a statement it disagreed with the ruling and was considering other options. No NSA staff or intelligence community entity has faced charges associated with the Upstream program, including former NSA chief James Clapper, who lied in Congressional testimony that no such program existed.
