To the surprise of no one, a class action lawsuit (PDF) has been filed against Apple, Tim Cook, President Obama, the NSA, and a host of others over alleged privacy violations via the NSA’s PRISM intelligence program. The suit was filed by a conservative activist, and three other parties.
The plaintiffs have also sued President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, NSA Director Keith Alexander, the NSA itself, the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as Facebook, Google, YouTube, Microsoft, Skype, AOL, Yahoo, PalTalk, AT&T and Sprint — and all the CEO’s of those companies personally.
As one of the largest companies in the world, Apple is routinely sued over a wide variety of issues. The company has a large legal teams to handle these lawsuits, though the sheer number of defendants in this case could make for interesting court filings.
Plaintiff Larry Klayman issued this statement:
This and the Verizon class action will serve to unify all political and social persuasions in our great nation to wage a second American revolution, one that is peaceful and legal – but pursued with great resolve and force. Government dishonesty and tyranny against the people have reached historic proportions during the last three administrations in particular, and the time has come for We the People to rise up and reclaim control of our nation. If not, the government will control us and this will mark the end of individual liberties. The American people can thus use these class actions to ‘man the barricades of freedom’ against the establishment government despots and their corporate enablers who seek to enslave them through coercive abuses of their privacy. This Orwellian power grab can only be intended to blackmail the masses into submission in order that these modern day greedy tyrants achieve their corrupt ends.
This isn’t the only class action lawsuit in the works over the PRISM disclosures. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), and the American Civil Liberties Union are both planning to file separate lawsuits over what Paul calls the “unconstitutional” surveillance programs. The ACLU is concentrating on the Government, alleging that the Government’s tracking of phone records violates Section 215 of the Patriot Act.
MacRumors notes that while both Rand Paul and the ACLU are primarily referring to the reports of Verizon giving call logs to the NSA covering millions of calls both within the United States and abroad, both that report and the Apple-related PRISM allegations were revealed on the same day, and are seen as connected in the eyes of most critics.
