Metadata Collection Reveals Personal Details, Rights Groups Assert

“Metadata is not trivial,” Electronic Frontier Foundation legal fellow Andrew Crocker said Wednesday, announcing the filing of an amicus brief in Klayman v. Obama, the high-profile lawsuit challenging the National Security Agency’s program of mass surveillance. 

The brief, filed jointly by the EFF and the American Civil Liberties Union, declares that “call records collected by the government are not just metadata — they are intimate portraits of the lives of millions of Americans.”

Larry Klayman, a conservative activist and founder of the political advocacy group Freedom Watch, filed his lawsuit against the NSA and President Obama in June, 2013. It alleges that the government is conducting a “secret and illegal government scheme to intercept vast quantities of domestic telephonic communications,” in violation of the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments. 

In December, Richard J. Leon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued a preliminary ruling that the program was likely unconstitutional, in violation of the right against unreasonable search or seizure under the Fourth Amendment; the case is currently on appeal before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In his ruling, Leon wrote: “I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary invasion’ than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying it and analyzing it without judicial approval.”

In their brief, the EFF and ACLU are equally harsh, asserting that changes in technology, as well as the government’s move from targeted to mass surveillance of American citizens, mean that previous legal decisions that the government relies on to justify its spying program do not apply.