Mozilla and World Wide Web Foundation petition US government over NSA PRISM spying

A public petition has surfaced, calling on the US Congress to investigate and disclose the full extent of National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance activities online.

The Stop Watching Us petition and open letter asks Congress to issue a public report on domestic surveillance activity and enact legislation to prevent authorities from performing wide-scale surveillance and monitoring of user activity and activity logs. Backers of the group include civil rights and user privacy groups as well as the World Wide Web Foundation and Mozilla.

The petition cites the recent high-profile data disclosures on NSA activities. A first leak reported on the existence of PRISM, a massive data archive that logged activity from multiple service providers including Google, Apple, Microsoft and Yahoo.

“This type of blanket data collection by the government strikes at bedrock American values of freedom and privacy,” the group said in its letter. “This dragnet surveillance violates the First and Fourth Amendments of the US Constitution, which protect citizens' right to speak and associate anonymously and guard against unreasonable searches and seizures that protect their right to privacy.”

Subsequent reports also found that the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) was accessing data from PRISM in its own domestic investigations. The source of the leak was later found to be a former NSA contractor who had fled to Hong Kong shortly before releasing the data.

After word broke of PRISM, a second leak brought the release of a presidential order asking government groups to assemble a list of possible foreign targets for cyber warfare.

Fallout from the reports has spurred some of the companies named in the programme to deny knowingly contributing to PRISM. Google executives have claimed that the company had only learned of its part in the programme after the public reports surfaced.