The ACLU says the �˜metadata�™ now known to be collected by the NSA, �œgives the government a comprehensive record of our associations and public movements.”
The American Civil Liberties Union has called for an end to the US National Security Agency�™s spying activities due to the violation of constitutional rights.
The rights group told a New York court that the agency breached the first and fourth amendments as well as exceeding the authority Congress gave to the government through the Patriot Act.
�œThis kind of dragnet surveillance is precisely what the fourth amendment was meant to prohibit,” Jameel Jaffer of the American Civil Liberties Union said on Friday.
�œThe constitution does not permit the NSA to place hundreds of millions of innocent people under permanent surveillance because of the possibility that information about some tiny subset of them will become useful to an investigation in the future,” he added.
Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director, said that to protect the constitutional rights, the courts should require the collection of phone data to be much more narrow and focused.
“You don’t need all call records in order to do what the government says it want to do,” he said.
However, a government lawyer insisted that counterterrorism investigators wouldn’t find most personal information useful.
Analysis of phone records has become an essential and legal tool to “find connections between known and unknown terrorists,” Stuart Delery said.
US District Court Judge William H. Pauley reserved decision on an ACLU request to halt the NSA surveillance programs pending the outcome of its suit against the Obama administration.
Earlier this year, the ACLU sued after American whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA is snooping on millions of telephone and Internet records.
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Source: Press TV