Wikimedia filed a lawsuit on Tuesday in the US District Court for the District of Maryland against the National Security Agency (NSA) and the US Department for Justice (DOJ) for allegedly violating its constitutional rights.
The organization states that an NSA program.Which collect's information across the Internet, known as upstream surveillance, is a violation of its First Amendment which is right of free speech and a violation of the Fourth Amendment which is ban on unreasonable search and seizure.
The American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and other human rights organizations, are co-plaintiffs on the lawsuit."The organization has been working on the lawsuit for approximately one year" said Wikimedia general Wikimedia general counsel Geoff Brigham.
When one NSA contractor Edward Snowden started leaking official US government documents in 2013.According to the Snowden leaks Wikipedia was mentioned as a target of government surveillance,he further added that the US government is using a dragnet to collect nearly all Internet communication and store it. This whole process is governed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that Congress amended in 2008, which now provides more support and freedom to US spy agencies to collect Internet information at will.
"In the course of its surveillance, the NSA copies and combs through vast amounts of Internet traffic, which it intercepts inside the United States with the help of major telecommunications companies," the ACLU said in a statement on Tuesday. He further said"It searches that traffic for keywords called 'selectors' that are associated with its targets. The surveillance involves the NSA's warrantless review of the emails and Internet activities of millions of ordinary Americans."Ultimately, Wikimedia wants US government stop its upstream surveillance and has asked the judiciary to rule it as unconstitutional activity. The lawsuit also requests that a permanent ban on upstream surveillance should be imposed and order US government to destroy all communications it has collected as part of the upstream surveillance program.
"Our role at the Wikimedia Foundation is to protect Wikipedia, its sister projects, and the Wikimedia community of users," the organization wrote on Tuesday. "This means providing our users with the right conditions to facilitate their work, and protecting them when necessary. Defending the privacy of our editors, readers, and community is paramount to us. We believe privacy is essential to facilitating and advancing free knowledge."said wikimedia
The time will tell that wether the US court will give decision in favor of wikimedia and will ask NSA to stop this program or the court will allow NSA to continue their survillience job.
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