The Wikimedia Foundation that operates Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, has sued the U.S. National Security Agency, alleging it violated U.S. laws on freedom of speech. The Department of Justice was named a co-defendant in the lawsuit.
The lawsuit seeks to end the NSA's massive worldwide surveillance efforts and was co-signed by eight other organizations: Amnesty International USA, PEN American Center, the Nation magazine, Human Rights Watch, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Global Fund for Women and Washington Office on Latin America.
The Wikimedia Foundation said it was taking action against the NSA's so-called "upstream" surveillance that targets communications with people not in the U.S. It said this spying violates U.S. laws on free speech and those that govern against unreasonable search and seizure. Wikipedia was one of the targets of NSA spying, said Reuters.
Wikimedia said the NSA's current practices exceed the authority granted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that Congress amended in 2008.
"We are asking the court to order an end to the NSA's dragnet surveillance of internet traffic," Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales wrote in an opinion piece in The New York Times.
The massive extent of NSA spying was revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden over the last two years. Some of Snowden's documents show the NSA tapped into the internet's backbone network to illegally obtain data. The backbone consists of high-speed cables linking big ISPs and key transit points on the internet.
Targeting the backbone meant the NSA cast a "vast net" and obtained data unrelated to any target. This data also included domestic communications, thereby violating the rules governing what the NSA can spy on.
"By tapping the backbone of the internet, the NSA is straining the backbone of democracy," said Lila Tretikov, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation.
She also said that by violating our users' privacy, "the NSA is threatening the intellectual freedom that is central to people's ability to create and understand knowledge".
The case is Wikimedia v. NSA., U.S. District Court, District Of Maryland, No. 1:15-cv-00662