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Lone Lawyer Sues Obama, Alleging Illegality of Surveillance Programs

posted by n1 on Friday October 24 2014, @10:11AM   
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.

• Re:"Lacks standing" Re:"Lacks standing" (Score: 2, Informative) by curunir_wolf on Friday October 24 2014, @04:59PM

  by curunir_wolf (4772) on Friday October 24 2014, @04:59PM (#109656)

  IIRC, there are 3 tests to establish "standing" in a court:

  1. The plaintiff must demonstrate he was damaged in some way. Courts have recognized a civil rights violation as damage, even if the plaintiff suffered no physical or financial loss.
  2. The court in question must have clearly established jurisdiction, based on location of the alleged wrongdoing and the parties involved.
  3. There must be some remedy available. I'm assuming that if the court has the authority to order the defendant to pay money, this one is satisfied.

  --
  I am a crackpot

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• Re:"Lacks standing" Re:"Lacks standing" (Score: 2) by redneckmother on Friday October 24 2014, @06:42PM

  by redneckmother (3597) on Friday October 24 2014, @06:42PM (#109677)

  If ignoring the Constitution and Bill of Rights isn't a civil rights violation, I don't know what is.

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  Mas cerveza por favor.

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  • Re:"Lacks standing" (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday October 28 2014, @02:08PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Tuesday October 28 2014, @02:08PM (#110853) Journal

    The question is if it violated *his* civil rights, not if it just violated civil rights in general. If your rights were violated, you have to be the one to sue. I can't sue on your behalf.

    Of course that's bullshit, it's a catch-22 situation -- they say he can't sue unless he was spied on, and he can't know if he was spied on because that would "compromise national security"...

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• Re:"Lacks standing" (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday October 24 2014, @07:01PM

  by tangomargarine (667) on Friday October 24 2014, @07:01PM (#109685)

  1. 4th Amendment, as mentioned in the summary.
  2. It's a federal court...the wiretapping was a federal program...are we going to start arguing about where the servers are located? Because that would be blatantly hypocritical as the U.S. government has demonstrated it doesn't give a shit whether the servers are even in another country.
  3. Remedy is to tell the NSA to stop...again...maybe they won't ignore us this time? Firing all the head honchos would be nice, too, but I'm not sure whether that's relevant to *this* case per se.

  --
  "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"

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