US sued over 'massively illegal' comms surveillance

The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit on Thursday against the Bush administration on behalf of AT&T customers, to halt what it called the "massively illegal" surveillance of Americans' internet and telephone communications.

In addition to suing the US National Security Agency (NSA), the not-for-profit internet-advocacy group also named president George Bush; vice president Dick Cheney; Cheney's chief of staff, David Addington; and former attorney general Alberto Gonzales; as well as others.

"For years, the NSA has been engaged in a massive and massively illegal fishing expedition through AT&T's domestic networks and databases of customer records," senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston said in a statement.

"Our goal in this new case against the government, as in our case against AT&T, is to dismantle this dragnet surveillance programme as soon as possible," said Bankston.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said the evidence it would present is the same evidence central to a class-action lawsuit it filed in 2006 accusing AT&T of opening up its telecommunications facilities to the NSA for use in spying on the phone calls and emails of "millions of ordinary Americans".

Such a practice violates free speech and privacy rights spelled out by the US Constitution, and also runs foul of federal wiretapping law, the EFF claimed.

The American Civil Liberties Union won a brief victory in a similar case filed against the NSA when a federal judge ruled in 2006 that the NSA's surveillance programme "ran roughshod" over Americans' constitutional rights and violated federal wiretapping law.

However, the Sixth US Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the suit in 2007 on narrow procedural grounds, without addressing the legality of the programme. The suit effectively died earlier this year when the US Supreme Court declined to intervene in an appeal.

In July, the Senate approved a bill that would rewrite federal wiretap laws by granting retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies as long as the government claimed the request was "lawful" and authorised by the president.

After the EFF's 2006 lawsuit was filed, reports of a secret room in an AT&T building in San Francisco surfaced and became central to the advocacy group's litigation.

Although EFF's lawsuit was filed before allegations about the room surfaced, reports of its existence have become central to the not-for-profit group's attempts to prove AT&T opened its network to the NSA.

Former AT&T employee Mark Klein released documents in 2006 alleging the company spliced its fibre-optic cables and ran a duplicate set of cables to Room 641A at its 611 Folsom Street building.

The deleted portions of a legal brief accidentally released in 2006 sought to offer benign reasons why AT&T would allegedly have a secret room at its downtown San Francisco switching centre designed to monitor internet and telephone traffic. AT&T has neither publicly confirmed nor denied co-operating with the National Security Agency.

Initial details of the surveillance programme surfaced in late 2005 in a Los Angeles Times article that quoted an unnamed source as saying the NSA has a "direct hook-up" into an AT&T database that stores information about all domestic phone calls, including how long they lasted.