Pretty Please?

[bigtree]

. . .or, whistleblowing in the wind?


Supreme Court asked to suspend NSA and FBI’s blanket collection of phone data

____ The US supreme court will be asked to suspend the blanket collection of US telephone records by the FBI under an emergency petition due to be filed on Monday by civil rights campaigners at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (Epic).

This new legal challenge to the power of government agencies to spy on Americans follows the publication last month by the Guardian of a secret order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ordering Verizon to hand over metadata from its phone records.

Previous attempts to appeal against the rulings of these courts have floundered due to a lack of public information about who might be caught up in the surveillance net, but the disclosure of specific orders by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden has opened the door to a flurry of new challenges. It comes as a similar legal challenge was filed in Britain on Monday.

The latest from Epic asks the supreme court to rule that the NSA and FBI have stretched the law governing state intrusion to such a point that checks and balances put in by lawmakers have become meaningless . . .


read more: http://bit.ly/158MwTk

[RobertEarl]

1. Millions of us on the SCOTUS stoop

And they might listen.

Given the SCOTUS just made drug companies free from lawsuits because of their damaging drugs, it might take 5 million of us, occupying their doorway, for them to listen.

[bigtree]

2. in this case

. . . more folks with standing to challenge the spying and prying.

Of course, the Court does what they please.