ARL Joins 86 Orgs and Internet Cos Demanding Committee Investigation and End to Dragnet Spying

Today, ARL joined with a broad, bipartisan coalition of 86 organizations and Internet companies – including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, reddit, Mozilla, and the American Civil Liberties Union – to send a letter to Congress demanding swift investigation and reform in light of the recent revelations about unchecked global surveillance.

The letter was accompanied by the launch of StopWatching.Us, a global petition demanding an inquiry into the scope and scale of spying activities.

Responding to recent leaked documents providing detailed evidence of the National Security Agency (NSA)’s collection of telephone records and online activity of innocent Americans and global Internet users, the groups called for a congressional investigatory committee similar to the Church Committee of the 1970s. The letter demands legal reforms to rein in spying and that public officials responsible for this unconstitutional surveillance be held accountable for their actions.

The letter denounced NSA’s spying program as illegal, noting:

“This type of blanket data collection by the government strikes at bedrock American values of freedom and privacy. This dragnet surveillance violates the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, which protect citizens’ right to speak and associate anonymously and guard against unreasonable searches and seizures that protect their right to privacy.”

The groups called for a numbers of specific reforms in their open letter to Congress, including:

• Reform to the controversial Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, the “business records” section which, through secret court orders, was misused to force Verizon to provide the NSA with detailed phone records of millions of customers.

• Reform to the FISA Amendment Act, the unconstitutional law that allows the government to conduct mass surveillance on American and international communications nearly without restriction.

• Amendment to the state secrets privilege, the legal tool that has expanded over the last 10 years to prevent the government from being held accountable for domestic surveillance.

• The formation of a Congressional investigatory committee to investigate, report, and reveal to the public the extent of domestic spying, and the creation of specific recommendations for legal and regulatory reform to end unconstitutional surveillance.

• Accountability for those public officials found to be responsible.

The global petition site, StopWatching.Us, offers American citizens and residents the ability to directly contact their elected representatives to demand oversight and reform, echoing the concerns of the coalition letter. The petition will allow non-US persons to communicate their concerns directly to the White House.

Individuals who would like to speak out against NSA spying are encouraged to sign here: https://StopWatching.Us

Full text of the open letter:

Dear Members of Congress,

We write to express our concern about recent reports published in the Guardian and the Washington Post, and acknowledged by the Obama Administration, which reveal secret spying by the National Security Agency (NSA) on phone records and Internet activity of people in the United States.

The Washington Post and the Guardian recently published reports based on information provided by a career intelligence officer showing how the NSA and the FBI are gaining broad access to data collected by nine of the leading U.S. Internet companies and sharing this information with foreign governments. As reported, the U.S. government is extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time. As a result, the contents of communications of people both abroad and in the U.S. can be swept in without any suspicion of crime or association with a terrorist organization.

Leaked reports also published by the Guardian and confirmed by the Administration reveal that the NSA is also abusing a controversial section of the PATRIOT Act to collect the call records of millions of Verizon customers. The data collected by the NSA includes every call made, the time of the call, the duration of the call, and other “identifying information” for millions of Verizon customers, including entirely domestic calls, regardless of whether those customers have ever been suspected of a crime. The Wall Street Journal has reported that other major carriers, including AT&T and Sprint, are subject to similar secret orders.

This type of blanket data collection by the government strikes at bedrock American values of freedom and privacy. This dragnet surveillance violates the First and Fourth Amendm