Broad coalition protests us surveillance programme

US: A coalition of Internet and civil liberties groups launched a campaign Tuesday protesting the huge US online surveillance programme revealed in the past week.

Joining the effort were the Mozilla Foundation, American Civil Liberties Union, Greenpeace USA, the World Wide Web Foundation and more than 80 other organizations or companies.

The coalition launched a website, StopWatching.us, and called on Congress to launch a full probe and urging more disclosure from US officials about the National Security Agency's vast Internet surveillance programme.

An online petition was also launched on the website.

“We don't want an Internet where everything we do is secretly logged and tracked by government,” said Alex Fowler, head of privacy and public policy for Mozilla, which produces the Firefox browser.

Fowler said the revelations “confirm many of our worst fears,” and “raise serious questions about individual privacy protections, checks on government power and court orders impacting some of the most popular Web services.”

Randy Reitman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation said the groups want legal reforms to halt this type of surveillance and a “full investigative congressional committee” on the matter.

The organizations also called for reform of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, a measure passed after the September 11 attacks, which authorize secret court orders used for some surveillance, and of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) which has also been used.

US rights group lodges suit against phone snooping

Meanwhile, the United States' best known civil rights group lodged a lawsuit on Tuesday alleging that a massive seizure of private phone records by government agents breached the constitution.

Last week a contractor working for the National Security Agency leaked details of a number of huge secret intelligence sweeps by the US government, including an operation to seize phone data from operator Verizon.

The programme hoovered up “metadata” -- the timing, location and destination but not the content -- of calls made by millions of Americans, triggering the anger of groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

“This dragnet programme is surely one of the largest surveillance efforts ever launched by a democratic government against its own citizens,” said Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director, in a statement announcing the suit.

“It is the equivalent of requiring every American to file a daily report with the government of every location they visited, every person they talked to on the phone, the time of each call, and the length of every conversation.

“The programme goes far beyond even the permissive limits set by the Patriot Act and represents a gross infringement of the freedom of association and the right to privacy,” he said, referring to a law passed after the 9/11 attacks. The group said it had filed suit with the FISA court, a secret chamber set up under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance ACT to oversee government snooping, alleging that the Verizon order breached the US constitution.

AFP