Wikipedia has become a key source of knowledge for millions of internet residents. While teachers aren't fans of students using it as a primary source, the site has been at the center of a worldwide spreading of information. Now the crowd-sourced encyclopedia is planning to take on one of the world's largest information-gathering agencies.
The Wikimedia Foundation has joined up with 9 other organizations to submit a lawsuit against the NSA. The lawsuit was submitted on Tuesday to the Maryland District Court, and, according to U.S. News and World Report, it "challenges the spy agency's 'Upstream' interception of communications from cables, switches and routers that make up the Internet's backbone." Upstream was the NSA's surveillance program that collected information directly from the internet infrastructure.
The lawsuit explicitly states that "this surveillance invades the privacy of Wikimedia, its staff, and its users, and it violates their right to control those communications and the information they contain." Wikimedia and its partners also noted in the lawsuit that any attempts by the NSA to minimize the information collected by the NSA were "feeble" at best. There are three other lawsuits in the courts that are currently under consideration from the U.S. Court of Appeals.
This isn't the first time someone has sued the NSA over its surveillance overreach. The ACLU was able to get a similar lawsuit all the way to the Supreme Court months before Edward Snowden revealed details about the NSA's overreach.
This lawsuit was created by a team-up between the conservative think-tank The Rutherford Institute, The Nation magazine, Amnesty International USA, PEN American Center, Human Rights Watch, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Global Fund for Women and the Washington Office on Latin America.