Judge: You can't sue the NSA for secretly spying on you unless you can prove they're secretly spying on you

On Tuesday, a federal judge ruled that anyone who wants to sue the NSA for secretly spying on them must first be able to specify exactly how the NSA is spying on them — despite the fact that it has been confirmed that the NSA spies on millions of Americans.

On top of the obvious difficulty of determining how the domestic surveillance branch of the most powerful government in the world is monitoring your life, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White put up a further barrier for suing the NSA. Even if you "could establish standing," he wrote, "a potential Fourth Amendment Claim would have to be dismissed on the basis that any possible defenses would require impermissible disclosure of state secret information."

Fortunately, the ruling only applies to upstream internet surveillance, which is an indiscriminate collection of massive amounts of data of web traffic and phone call patterns.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up