Rights Group Will Sue US Government over Wiretapping

"If Congress wants to shut down one avenue, we will go down another," EFF legal director Cindy Cohn said, noting that the amnesty provisions in the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 do not apply the government itself as the Administration had first wanted.

The full extent of the government's warrantless spying has yet to be revealed, but it is reported to involve massive data-mining of Americans' phone records, and broad wiretapping of communicationst that enter or leave the U.S. border .

After the portion that targeted Americans' international communications was submitted to the nation's acquiesent secret spying court for blanket approval in January 2007, the program was quickly found to be illegal.

That prompted the Bush Administration to scare Congress into giving it wide, but temporary powers to turn American internet and phone companies into de facto extensions of the nation's spooks.

After a few months of standing up to the Administration's typical terrorism rhetoric, a Democratic-controlled Congress caved to political pressure in July and handed a significant victory to President Bush by approving retroactive amnesty to telecoms that spied on Americans without following the st helping the government warrantlessly and secretly spy on Americans.

We are bringing our many years of experience fighting illegal spying to bear on a new case – and this time, rather than holding private actors accountable, we will be taking on the government. For the moment we are keeping the details of this litigation to ourselves. But the goal is the same: to stop the wholesale surveillance of millions of Americans and restore our constitutional protections.