Amnesty et al v. McConnell (Challenging the FISA Amendments Act of 2008)

Case Status

Open

Case Description

S.D.N.Y., Index No. 08 Civ. 6259 (direct)

This case challenges the constitutionality of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 – a law that gives the government virtually unchecked authority to intercept Americans’ international e-mails and telephone calls.

The NYCLU and ACLU filed the lawsuit on behalf of a broad coalition of attorneys and human rights, labor, legal and media organizations whose ability to perform their work – which relies on confidential communications – are compromised by the new law. Most of the clients are in New York.

The law, signed by President Bush on July 10, 2008, not only legalizes the warrantless surveillance program that the president approved in late 2001, it gives the government new spying powers, including the power to conduct dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international communications.

The NYCLU and ACLU argue that the spying law violates Americans’ rights to free speech and privacy under the First and Fourth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The law permits the government to conduct intrusive surveillance without telling a court who it intends to spy on, what phone lines and e-mail addresses it intends to monitor, where its surveillance targets are located, why it’s conducting the surveillance or whether it suspects any party to the communication of wrongdoing. The lawsuit seeks a court order declaring that the law is unconstitutional and ordering its immediate and permanent halt.

Plaintiffs in the case are The Nation and its contributing journalists Naomi Klein and Chris Hedges, Amnesty International USA, Global Rights, Global Fund for Women, Human Rights Watch, PEN American Center, Service Employees International Union, Washington Office on Latin America, and International Criminal Defense Attorneys Association defense attorneys Dan Arshack, David Nevin, Scott McKay and Sylvia Royce.

Attorneys are NYCLU Legal Director Arthur Eisenberg, NYCLU Associate Legal Director Chris Dunn, and Jameel Jaffer, Melissa Goodman, and L. Danielle Tully of the ACLU National Security Project.

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