The Electronic Privacy Information Center wants the National Security Agency to release information regarding alleged Internet snooping on American citizens by way of the controversial Echelon program.
EPIC director Marc Rotenberg says in a statement that the NSA charter does not authorize domestic intelligence gathering, but the group "has reason to believe that the NSA is engaged in the indiscriminate acquisition and interception of domestic communications taking place over the Internet."
The lawsuit was filed last Friday in federal district court. EPIC wants public disclosure of internal agency documents discussing the legality of its intelligence activities, according to Wired. The magazine's Web site also says EPIC wants to evaluate the legal basis for intercepting private citizens' communications in a study to be issued early next year, done by a Scottish journalist and television producer who did a similar probe for the European Parliament.
That report claimed evidence of an internationally-coordinated project called Echelon, producing the first public documentation of activities which lined up to a long-suspected global project monitoring citizen communications worldwide, Wired says.
The NSA has already been reprimanded by House Intelligence Committee chairman Porter Gross, a Republican congressman from Florida, after the agency would not give legal memoranda on citizen surveillance. Goss called the agency's reasoning "unpersuasive and dubious," and said if agency attorneys interpreted its mandate too liberally, privacy interests of American citizens were vulnerable, says Wired.
EPIC sued after failing to get NSA information under the Freedom of Information Act, under which the agency in question has twenty working days to respond - which the NSA never did, says Wired.
