One of the most outspoken members of the U.S. Congress is organizing an ambitious lawsuit against President Barack Obama.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of all Americans who've used a phone since 2006. The complaint charges Obama, as well as Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander and FBI Director James Comey, with violating the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by collecting and storing Americans' phone data on a massive scale.
See also: 5 Things Obama Failed to Address in the NSA Speech
"I expect this case to go all the way to the Supreme Court and I predict the American people will win,” Paul said in a statement.
Joined by the conservative and libertarian non-profit FreedomWorks and former Attorney General of Virginia Ken Cuccinelli, Paul submitted the complaint to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Wednesday morning.
Paul told reporters he was filing the motion as an individual citizen, "separate from [his] legislative function," at a Wednesday news conference held outside the courthouse. It calls for an end to the government's "mass, suspicionless, non-particularized collection, storage, retention and search of telephone metadata," which the governments justifies based on Section 215 of the Patriot Act.
Starting last year, news reports based on documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden ignited a global debate on governmental surveillance. The U.S. justice system is in the middle of this debate. In December, a federal judge ruled that the NSA's phone data collection program likely violates the Fourth Amendment, calling it "almost Orwellian." Less than two weeks later, a separate federal judge offered a contradictory decision, ruling the metadata program legal.
"We agree that the NSA’s phone-records program is unconstitutional," Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told Mashable in an email. "Mass surveillance of this kind infringes not just on privacy rights but on the freedoms of speech and association as well."
The ACLU was on the wrong end of the latter federal ruling mentioned above, but Jaffer said the group plans to advance its lawsuit in a federal appeals court sometime during the next few weeks.
Paul, after submitting his own suit, stressed that the debate over government surveillance should occur in a public court, not the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and he said it's his understanding that several Supreme Court justices are willing to revisit past decisions on privacy.
"I'm supportive of the idea that we should adjudicate these questions to figure out where we are," Paul said. "We live in a much more advanced technological age with so much more information just flying about the Internet."
Below is the full complaint.
Rand Paul Class Action Lawsuit Against Obama

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