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 - 30 -