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Lone Lawyer Sues Obama, Alleging Illegality of Surveillance Programs

posted by n1 on Friday October 24 2014, @10:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the classified-[redacted]-[redacted]-case-dismissed-[redacted] dept.

AnonTechie writes with an article from Ars Technica:

Justice Department lawyers have asked a federal court in Pittsburgh to dismiss a sweeping lawsuit brought earlier this year by a local lawyer against President Barack Obama and other top intelligence officials.

In a new motion to dismiss filed on Monday, the government told the court that the Pittsburgh lawyer, Elliott Schuchardt, lacked standing to make a claim that his rights under the Fourth Amendment have been violated as a result of multiple ongoing surveillance programs.

Specifically, Schuchardt argued in his June 2014 complaint that both metadata and content of his Gmail, Facebook, and Dropbox accounts were compromised under the PRISM program as revealed in the documents leaked by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden.

 
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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by weeds on Friday October 24 2014, @01:49PM

    by weeds (611) on Friday October 24 2014, @01:49PM (#109563) Journal

    From the motion:

    Despite the addition of numerous extraneous allegations, the Amended Complaint fails to
    plead any facts plausibly showing that Plaintiff’s communications have been intercepted by the
    Government under PRISM collection conducted pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign
    Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”), or that records containing information about Plaintiff’s
    telephone calls have been collected under the Government’s “Section 215” bulk telephony
    metadata program.

    No attempt to deny PRISM or bulk telephony metadata program.
    IANAL - but I can read :) I am fairly sure that a motion to dismiss is a common practice.
    In this case the defendant is stating that plaintif can't sue them because the plaintif first has to prove that his information was collected and even if he did, the programs are legal, and the US gov officers can't be sued when doing their jobs. So tough luck buddy!
    I am sure one of our readers who is a lawyer can clean up my layman's interpretation.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 24 2014, @03:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 24 2014, @03:21PM (#109592)

    If they breach his constitutional right (that's the culprit, he has to prove that), they're not legal. Thus suing on the 4th.

    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday October 24 2014, @03:58PM

      by bob_super (1357) on Friday October 24 2014, @03:58PM (#109621)

      See Sir Garlon's post below, about the inability to prove Standing in the case.
      Even if you got into the NSA's database, and proved that it contains records of your communications, they still would play on semantics to get the case dismissed. Because a database entry is not (according to them) a search until someone specifically analyses it.