The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that operates the wildly popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia, says user privacy has been violated and that it’s going to court to try to fix it.

Wikimedia filed a lawsuit on Tuesday in the US District Court for the District of Maryland against the National Security Agency and the US Department of Justice for allegedly violating its constitutional rights on Wikipedia. The organization argues that an NSA program collecting information wholesale across the Internet, known as upstream surveillance, is a violation of its First Amendment right of free speech and a violation of the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable search and seizure.

Wikimedia said it is joined by eight other organizations, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, and represented by The American Civil Liberties Union. Wikimedia has been working on the lawsuit for “approximately one year,” said its general counsel, Geoff Brigham.

“Privacy is the bedrock of individual freedom. It is a universal right that sustains the freedoms of expression and association,” Wikimedia wrote Tuesday on its blog. “These principles enable inquiry, dialogue, and creation and are central to Wikimedia’s vision of empowering everyone to share in the sum of all human knowledge. … If people look over their shoulders before searching, pause before contributing to controversial articles, or refrain from sharing verifiable but unpopular information, Wikimedia and the world are poorer for it.”

Read the Full Article: Source – c|net
http://www.cnet.com/news/wikipedia-operator-sues-nsa-over-upstream-surveillance/

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