Appeals Court Upholds Law on Surveillance

However, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit also revived a separate lawsuit against the government over its surveillance activities.

Several lawsuits were filed after revelations about warrantless wiretapping asserted that telecom companies provided federal authorities with direct access to nearly all communications passing through their domestic facilities.

Besides the government itself, defendants included ATT, Sprint Nextel and Verizon Communications.

In 2008, Congress granted telecommunications companies immunity for cooperating with the government’s intelligence-gathering activities. A district judge in San Francisco upheld the law as constitutional and dismissed the claims against the companies.

In a ruling on Thursday, a unanimous three-judge panel for the Ninth Circuit agreed. Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a leading plaintiff in both cases, said no decision had been made on whether to appeal the ruling.

A spokesman for the Justice Department, which defended the immunity provision, declined to comment, as did a Verizon spokesman. Representatives from ATT and Sprint did not respond to a request for comment.

Judge M. Margaret McKeown of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected the argument that immunity closed the courts to the plaintiffs. Only the telecommunications companies are covered, she wrote, not the government.

“The federal courts remain a forum to consider the constitutionality of the wiretapping scheme and other claims,” she wrote.

In a separate ruling, the appeals court on Thursday allowed a separate case against the government to proceed, in which plaintiffs say that the National Security Agency engaged in “an unprecedented suspicionless general search,” diverting Internet traffic into secure rooms in ATT facilities.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=73ae0f7346aaefb5f269fb2559298414