Net’s ‘backbone’ tapped — lawsuit

The United States National Security Agency was sued on Wednesday by an array of groups challenging one of its mass surveillance programmes that they said violates Americans’ privacy and threatens communications worldwide by dissidents living under oppressive regimes.

The lawsuit filed in federal court in Maryland, where the spy agency is based, said the NSA is violating US constitutional protections and the law by tapping into high-capacity cables, switches and routers that move internet traffic through the United States.

The lawsuit is a new potential legal front for privacy advocates who have brought multiple challenges to spying programmes since 2013, when documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed the long reach of US surveillance.

Other lawsuits have challenged the bulk collection of telephone metadata and are pending in US appeals courts.

The litigation announced today, however, takes on what is often called ‘‘upstream’’ collection because it happens along the socalled backbone of the internet and away from individual users.

The plaintiffs include the Wikimedia Foundation, the conservative Rutherford Institute and other organisations.

Bulk collection there violates the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which protects freedom of speech and association, and the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure, the lawsuit said.

An Obama administration official said: ‘‘We’ve been very clear about what constitutes a valid target of electronic surveillance.

‘‘The act of innocuously updating or reading an online article does not fall into that category.’’

The US Department of Justice, which was named as a defendant along with the NSA, said it was reviewing the lawsuit.

‘‘By tapping the backbone of the internet, the NSA is straining the backbone of democracy,’’ Lila Tretikov, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, said in a statement.

One potential roadblock the plaintiffs face is that the government could try to assert what is known as the state secrets privilege, saying that continuing with the lawsuit would expose classified information, said Carrie Cordero, director of national security studies at Georgetown University Law Center.

Tretikov and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales wrote in the New York Times’ opinion pages that they were concerned about where data on their users ends up after it is collected in bulk by the NSA. Citing close intelligence ties between the United States and Egypt, they said a user in Egypt would have reason to fear reprisal if she edited a page about the country’s political opposition.

The seven other plaintiffs in the lawsuit are Amnesty International USA, PEN American Centre, the Nation magazine, Human Rights Watch, the National Association of Criminal Defence Lawyers, Global Fund for Women, and the Wash-

We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will - Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook

ington Office on Latin America.

The American Civil Liberties Union Foundation and the law firm Proskauer Rose are representing the plaintiffs.

CIA researchers have worked for nearly a decade to break the security protecting Apple phones and tablets, investigative news site The Intercept reported today, citing documents obtained from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The report cites top-secret American documents that suggest US government researchers had created a version of XCode, Apple’s software application development tool, to create surveillance backdoors into programs distributed on Apple’s App Store.

The Intercept has in the past published a number of reports from documents released by whistleblower Snowden. The site’s editors include Glenn Greenwald, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his work in reporting on Snowden’s revelations, and by Oscar-winning documentary maker Laura Poitras.

It said the latest documents, which covered a period from 2006 to 2013, stop short of proving whether American intelligence researchers had succeeded in breaking Apple’s encryption coding, which secures user data and communications.

Efforts to break into Apple products by government security researchers started as early as 2006, a year before Apple introduced its first iPhone and continued through the launch of the iPad in 2010 and beyond, The Intercept said.

Breaching Apple security was part of a top secret programme by the US government, aided by British intelligence researchers, to hack ‘‘secure communications products, both foreign and domestic’’ including Google Android phones, it said.

Silicon Valley technology companies have in recent months sought to restore trust among consumers around the world that their products have not become tools for widespread government surveillance of citizens.

Last September,

Apple strengthened encryption methods for data stored on iPhones, saying the changes meant the company no longer had any way to extract customer data on the devices, even if a government ordered it to with a search warrant. Silicon Valley rival Google Inc said shortly afterward that it also planned to increase the use of stronger encryption tools.

Both companies said the moves were aimed at protecting the privacy of users of their products and that this was partly a response to widescale US government spying on internet users revealed by Snowden in 2013.

An Apple spokesman pointed to public statements by Chief Executive Tim Cook on privacy, but declined to comment further.

‘‘I want to be absolutely clear that we have never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services,’’ Cook wrote in a statement on privacy and security published last year. ‘‘We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will.’’

The CIA did not immediately reply to a request for comment.