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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: 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.