FOR RELEASE:
Friday, December 3, 1999
      
  LAWSUIT SEEKS MEMOS ON SURVEILLANCE OF AMERICANS;
 EPIC LAUNCHES STUDY OF NSA INTERCEPTION ACTIVITIES
      
WASHINGTON, DC - The Electronic Privacy Information Center
(EPIC) today asked a federal court to order the release of
controversial documents concerning potential government
surveillance of American citizens. EPIC's lawsuit seeks the
public disclosure of internal National Security Agency (NSA)
documents discussing the legality of the agency's intelligence
activities.
      
NSA refused to provide the documents to the House Intelligence
Committee earlier this year, resulting in an unusual public
reprimand of the secretive spy agency. Rep. Porter J. Goss,
chairman of the oversight panel, wrote in a committee report in
May that NSA's rationale for withholding the legal memoranda was
"unpersuasive and dubious." He noted that if NSA lawyers
"construed the Agency's authorities too permissively, then the
privacy interests of the citizens of the United States could be
at risk." Soon after the release of the Intelligence Committee
report, EPIC submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
request to NSA for the documents. Despite the FOIA's time limit
of 20 working days, the agency has not responded to EPIC's
request.
      
EPIC Director Marc Rotenberg said "the charter of the National
Security Agency does not authorize domestic intelligence
gathering. Yet we have reason to believe that the NSA is engaged
in the indiscriminate acquisition and interception of domestic
communications taking place over the Internet."
      
The surveillance activities of the NSA have recently come under
increased scrutiny, with published reports indicating that the
agency is coordinating a massive global interception initiative
known as ECHELON. The current issue of the New Yorker magazine
reports that it took NSA only 11 months to fill three years'
worth of planned storage capacity for intercepted Internet
traffic.
      
The legal basis for NSA's interception activities is a critical
issue that EPIC plans to evaluate in a comprehensive study to be
released early next year. That study will be conducted by
Duncan Campbell, a Scottish investigative journalist and TV
producer. Earlier this year, Campbell was appointed a
consultant to the European Parliament and prepared a technology
assessment report on ECHELON and communications intelligence
which contained the first public documentary evidence of the
global surveillance system. Campbell will be working with EPIC
as a Senior Research Fellow for several months to produce
a report for presentation at anticipated congressional hearings
on the topic of signals intelligence agencies, the Fourth
Amendment and human rights.
      
More information on ECHELON is available at the EchelonWatch
website, which is administered by the American Civil Liberties
Union:
      
         http://www.echelonwatch.org  
      
      
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