MIAMI, Jan. 29 (UPI) -- The American Civil Liberties Union is fighting to keep five anti-wiretapping lawsuits in the states where it had filed them.
The ACLU said in a statement last week that its actions against local Public Utility Commissions, or PUCs, in the five states were considered Thursday by the Multidistrict Litigation Panel. The U.S. government wants to consolidate the cases and have them heard in California.
"The lawsuit against the Maine PUC should be kept in Maine where the challenge was filed and where the affected population lives," said Zachary Heiden, a staff attorney with the Maine Civil Liberties Union who argued before the panel.
The suits are part of a barrage of legal actions filed by the ACLU and other rights groups in the wake of revelations in 2005 that the National Security Agency, or NSA, was engaged in warrantless surveillance of telephone calls into and out of the United States by suspected terrorists.
The government argued last week that cases seeking an end to the eavesdropping on the grounds it was unconstitutional were mooted by their decision to have the program overseen by a special court.
But other suits aimed at telephone companies or their regulators are still going ahead.
"The government is seeking to evade responsibility by having disparate lawsuits in individual states merged and moved across the country," said Heiden.
The ACLU said in statement that its affiliates in 24 states asked state PUCs to investigate the phone companies and their compliance with the NSA program. In Maine, Connecticut, Vermont and Missouri the government filed federal lawsuits to prevent regulators from investigating the program, and in New Jersey it sued to block subpoenas about the program.
"The government is trying to delay judicial decisions in these cases by having them consolidated, transferred and stayed pending an appeals court ruling in a related case in California," said Barry Steinhardt, Director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Project. "If the government gets its way it may be more than a year before the American people can learn whether their privacy will be protected."
