US senator plans legal suit against Obama admin for massive spying bid

The Kentucky senator further emphasized during a nationally televised interview with Fox News Sunday show that he intends to rally “the support of 10 million Americans” for his class action lawsuit.
 
“I’m going to be seeing if I can challenge this at the Supreme Court level,” Paul reportedly said.
 
    “I’m going to be asking all the Internet providers and all of the phone companies, ask your customers to join me in a class action lawsuit. If we get 10 million Americans saying we don’t want our phone records looked at, then somebody will wake up and say things will change in Washington,” he further emphasized.
 
 
Senator Paul also insisted that public outrage over two pieces of legislation, known as SOPA and PIPA, which triggered Internet privacy concerns, have proved very successful.
 
“If we can have that again - people by the millions coming out and saying, ‘Look, I want to be part of a class action suit that says to the government, let’s hear this at the Supreme Court level. Are you allowed to look at phone records even though there’s no probable cause that I’m related to a crime?’ - I think we’ll put an end to this,” Paul also underlined.
 
The development comes just days after leaked reports that the largest US spy institution, the National Security Agency (NSA) has ordered one of the nation’s major phone companies to collect and submit phone records of tens of millions of its American customers under a “top-secret” court order issued in April.
 
The secret order required the huge American phone company, Verizon, to provide the NSA “with daily information on all telephone calls by its customers within the United States and from foreign locations into the United States,” the UK-based Guardian and the US-based The Washington Post dailies reported last week.
 
The order was reportedly signed off by “a judge from the secret court that oversees domestic surveillance” and may constitute “the broadest surveillance order” ever issued.
 
    The development further confirmed persisting suspicions of civil liberties activists across America about the sweeping nature of US government’s surveillance measures on its own citizens through corporate commercial carriers under the laws hastily passed by American lawmakers following the suspicious September 11, 2001 incidents in New York and near Washington DC that killed nearly 3,000 people.
 
 
Despite the outrage, US President Barack Obama and the Director of US National Intelligence James Clapper defended the massive surveillance efforts as “legal,” longstanding and well-known to the nation’s Congress.
 
Meanwhile, former NSA system administrator and ex-CIA undercover agent Edward Snowden revealed on Sunday that he was the source behind leaking the information about the massive NSA surveillance of American electronic communications.
 
While declaring his intension to seek asylum in another country, Snowden said, “I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things… I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded.”