Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that runs free online encyclopedia Wikipedia, will file a lawsuit against the National Security Agency and the US Department of Justice, challenging the government's mass surveillance program.
The lawsuit, to be filed today, alleges that the NSA's mass surveillance of Internet traffic in the United States, often called Upstream surveillance, violates the US Constitution's First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech and association, and the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure.
The NSA's Upstream surveillance program captures communications with "non-US persons" in order to acquire foreign intelligence information.
"Wikipedia is founded on the freedoms of expression, inquiry, and information. By violating our users' privacy, the NSA is threatening the intellectual freedom that is central to people's ability to create and understand knowledge."
"We are asking the court to order an end to the NSA's dragnet surveillance of Internet traffic," Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales wrote in an opinion piece in the New York Times. (http://nyti.ms/1NDdWc0)
Major US technology companies suffering from the fallout of NSA's mass surveillance programs are uniting to shore up their defenses against government intrusion.
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