WikiMedia files suit against the NSA and the US Department of Justice over upstream mass surveillance.

The WikiMedia Foundation, also known from Wikipedia, have formed a coalition with eight other organizations to sue the National Security Agency and the Department of Justice for the mass upstream surveillance programs. This coalition is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union. A full complaint can be found here.

“We’re filing suit today on behalf of our readers and editors everywhere,” said Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. “Surveillance erodes the original promise of the internet: an open space for collaboration and experimentation, and a place free from fear.”

Privacy equals freedom, and if you have read my earlier article, you will also known that I believe that privacy is required in a democracy. In this particular case, this privacy coalition challenges the NSA’s use of upstream surveillance. Upstream surveillance in this case refers to internet backbones. These backbones are extremely crucial to the internet, you can compare them as vital as a brain stem. The backbones are responsible to deliver and handle all the traffic over the internet, and having these monitored means that everything can be recorded back to you if they want to. Personal messages, your emails, the websites that you visit, articles you write, content you submit, the cat videos (and others) that you watch, literally everything as all this content passes through a backbone somewhere.

You can read more about this on the WikiMedia blog.