IDG News Service (Washington, D.C., Bureau) — A U.S. appeals court has ordered that a lawsuit against the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) for a wiretapping program be dismissed because the plaintiffs haven't been hurt by the agency's actions.
A divided three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled Friday that the lawsuit, brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and a group of journalists, lawyers and academics, be sent back to a district court judge to be dismissed. In August 2006, Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan ruled the NSA program, which monitored telephone and Internet communications without court-ordered warrants, was illegal.
The appeals court ruled that the plaintiffs didn't prove they'd been affected by the NSA's Terrorist Surveillance Program, authorized by U.S. President George Bush in 2002. The program allowed the NSA to monitor communications between U.S. residents and people in other countries with suspected ties to terrorist group al Qaeda.
The plaintiffs argued, among other things, that the program violated the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment, protecting U.S. citizens against unreasonable search and seizure. But none of the plaintiffs could prove their Fourth-Amendment rights had been violated, wrote appeals court Judge Alice Batchelder.
"The plaintiffs cannot show they have been or will be subject to surveillance personally," Batchelder wrote.
The plaintiff's attempts to sue for other reasons, including violation of their First-Amendment, free-speech rights, are a "thinly veiled ruse," the judge added. None of the plaintiffs has shown that their speech has been hindered, she wrote.
Neither the ACLU nor the U.S. Department of Justice, which appealed the lower court ruling on behalf of the NSA, were immediately available for comment on the ruling.
Judge Ronald Lee Gilman disagreed with the two-judge majority, arguing that the NSA program violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which establishes wiretapping procedures, including warrants. "When faced with the clear wording of FISA ... the conclusion becomes inescapable that [the program] was unlawful," he wrote.
