[6218] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
NSA sued for privacy violations
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Udhay Shankar N)
Mon Dec 6 12:35:27 1999
Message-Id: <4.2.0.58.19991206091838.009adb50@202.54.12.17>
Date: Mon, 06 Dec 1999 09:19:15 -0800
To: cryptography@c2.net
From: Udhay Shankar N <udhay@pobox.com>
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http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/zd/19991205/tc/19991205067.html
Sunday December 05 04:30 PM EST
Privacy group sues NSA over spy net
Robert Lemos, ZDNet
Americans could learn more about the degree to which the secretive National
Security Agency -- the government body charged with cracking codes and
protecting critical information -- has been spying on U.S. citizens, if a
suit filed on Friday by the Electronics Privacy Information Center garners
results.
"The charter of the National Security Agency does not authorize domestic
intelligence gathering," said Marc Rotenberg, director of EPIC, in a
statement on Friday. "Yet we have reason to believe that the NSA is engaged
in the indiscriminate acquisition and interception of domestic
communications taking place all over the Internet."
The questions arose from reports to the European Union last year that the
United Kingdom and Australia, among other countries, had cooperated with
the United States to collect electronic communications across national
borders. In the report, the spy network was dubbed "Echelon."
"We are concerned less with Echelon in particular and more with the NSA's
eavesdropping practices in particular," said David Sobel, general counsel
for EPIC.
'Interesting questions'
On Friday, EPIC filed a suit in federal court to free up documents
regarding the legal justification for any surveillance that NSA had
performed regarding U.S. citizens. These same documents were requested
earlier this year by the House Intelligence Subcommittee, but the NSA
refused to provide them.
"There are a lot of interesting questions about the NSA's activity, and it
raised a few eyebrows when they stonewalled the House subcommittee," said
Sobel.
In early June, EPIC filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the
NSA, asking for the same documents requested by the House subcommittee, and
the NSA replied that it would provide the documents by Oct. 30.
The court filing comes after the NSA missed that deadline. The NSA has 30
days to respond to the court filing.
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