Wikimedia lawsuit against NSA continues after previous rejection

American judges have ruled on appeal that Wikimedia, the organization behind Wikipedia, can continue its lawsuit against the NSA. In 2015, a lower court ruled that the charge, which concerns large-scale data collection, should be dismissed.

At the time, the judge dismissed the case brought by nine different organizations in 2015 because there was a lack of evidence. The motivation was that the organizations had insufficiently demonstrated that their communications were intercepted by the NSA. The American Civil Liberties Union, which is conducting the case on behalf of the complainants, writes that this view has now been deviated from on appeal. All three judges have ruled that Wikimedia has a right of appeal, so that the case can go ahead.

However, this does not apply to the other organizations, including Amnesty International USA, Human Rights Watch and Global Fund for Women. The judges write that their ‘complaint does not contain sufficiently well-substantiated facts’. About Wikimedia, the judges said: “Wikimedia has credibly argued that its communications take any avenue that communication can take, and that the NSA intercepts all communications on at least one of these avenues. Therefore, Wikimedia has the legal right to complain about a violation of the Fourth Amendment. And because it has applied self-censorship and withheld communication in response to upstream surveillance, it also has the right to complain about violations of the First Amendment.”

Wikimedia argued in the 2015 indictment that the NSA is directly damaging democracy by tapping data on internet backbones. In addition, the dragnet methods carried out by the NSA would be against the law, partly because the privacy of Wikipedia users worldwide would be violated on a large scale.

Whistleblower Edward Snowden exposed the methods of the NSA. According to Wikimedia’s lawyers, the NSA violates, among other things, the First and Fourth Amendments to the US Constitution, which respectively guarantee freedom of expression and protect against unlawful searches and seizures.

In another case, also discussing NSA espionage under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, another judge has ruled that the US government must provide all necessary evidence to show or disprove that the complainants were tapped via internet backbones, the civil rights organization EFF wrote on Tuesday.