First Public Court Challenge to NSA Data Collection From Internet Backboneselfnews Post The hearing on a motion for partial summary judgment in Jewel v. NSA will be at 9 am on Dec. 19 before Judge Jeffrey White at the federal courthouse in Oakland. Jewel was filed in 2008 on behalf of San Francisco Bay Area resident Carolyn Jewel and other ATT customers. EFF has amassed a mountain of evidence to support the case, including documents provided by former ATT technician Mark Klein, which show that the company has routed copies of Internet traffic to a secret room in San Francisco controlled by the NSA. Other whistleblowersincluding Thomas Drake, Bill Binney and Edward Snowdenhave revealed more detail about how this technique feeds data into the NSAs massive databases of communications. Since June 2013, the government has confirmed that it searches much of the content it collects as part of its upstream collection without a warrant. The government claims the content searches are justified under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act and do not violate the Fourth Amendment. Under the governments legal theory, it can copy virtually all Internet communications and then search them from top to bottom for specific identifiersall without a warrant or individualized suspicionas long as it does so quickly using only automated processes. EFF Special Counsel Richard Wiebe will argue before the court that the Fourth Amendment definitively bars this type of dragnet. As EFF presented in its motion, enough information now exists on the record for the court to rule that the governments technique represents an unconstitutional search and seizure. What: Motion for Partial Summary Judgment Who: Richard Wiebe, EFF Special Counsel Date: Friday, Dec. 19, 2014 Time: 9:00 am Where: Wiebe and EFF staff attorneys will be available for comment immediately following the hearing. For more on Jewel v. NSA: https://www.eff.org/cases/jewel 