ACLU and Amnesty International Challenge Expansion of FISA

The rest of the government may have been shut down yesterday for the hurricane, but not the U.S. Supreme Court.

Human-rights groups, including America's Charities members The ACLU and Amnesty International, along with journalists who routinely have conversations with people overseas — conversations that they say almost certainly have been monitored — appeared before the Supreme Court to challenge the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA. The new law broadly expanded the government's ability to conduct large-scale monitoring of international phone calls and emails to and from people in the United States. Those challenging the expansion of FISA contend that by authorizing what they call dragnet surveillance, FISA violates the Constitution's ban on unreasonable searches.