The Department of Justice and the NSA are being sued by the Wikimedia Foundation with the goal of ending “this mass surveillance program in order to protect the rights of our users around the world,” in reference to the massive surveillance operations that have been conducted by the NSA over the past few years as revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in his leaks.
The Wikimedia Foundation (“Wikimedia”), parent organization of ubiquitous online encyclopedia Wikipedia, has announced that it has filed a suit against the National Security Agency (NSA) and Department of Justice (DOJ) in the U.S., as it looks to “challenge upstream mass surveillance.” The case in question, of course, relates to NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden’s leaks to the media which started back in 2013, which unearthed a myriad of global surveillance programs, some of which were run in cahoots with other governments. Wikimedia’s lawsuit is setting out challenge the “large-scale search and seizure of internet communications,” which is often called “upstream surveillance.”