The Supreme Court Just Prevented One Of The Most High Stakes Encyclopedia Battles Ever From Happening

(Photo by Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States via Getty Images)

Need to prove to your friend that earth worms are hermaphroditic? Wikipedia. Need to prove to a friend how absurd language can be by showing a series of meaningful sentences that consist of one word multiple times? Wikipedia. Want to fight the NSA's alleged massive online surveillance?

Not so fast Wikipedia.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear a bid by the operator of the popular Wikipedia internet encyclopedia to resurrect its lawsuit against the National Security Agency challenging mass online surveillance.

Turning away the Wikimedia Foundation's appeal, the justices left in place a lower court's dismissal of the lawsuit based on the government's assertion of what is called the state secrets privilege, a legal doctrine that can shut down litigation if disclosure of certain information would damage U.S. national security.

Disappointing decision today by the Supreme Court to deny cert in Wikimedia v. NSA, a challenge to the mass surveillance of Americans' international communications.

In short: the government's unjustified claims of secrecy prevailed over the rule of law. https://t.co/NZirFIjXfF

-- Ashley Gorski (@ashgorski) February 21, 2023

You know things have to be spectacularly bad when the librarians of the internet think something is worth going to court over.

Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, Knight First Amendment Institute and Cooley LLP, Wikimedia Foundation sued in 2015 challenging the legality of the NSA's "Upstream" surveillance of foreign targets through the "suspicionless" collection and searching of internet traffic on data transmission lines flowing into and out of the United States.

The lawsuit cast the "surveillance dragnet" as an unlawful invasion of Americans' privacy that violates the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech, and Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. Wikimedia compared the interception by the NSA of its communications to the "seizing and searching the patron records of the largest library in the world."

The information that could have come from this case were it granted certiorari could have been groundbreaking. Everyone probably would have acted shocked and appalled until the next news event swept in a la the Snowden Papers, but who knows? The Court has spoken. For now.

In the meantime, know where to go if you'd like to read the backstory on this lawsuit? Wikipedia.

U.S. Supreme Court Snubs Wikipedia Bid To Challenge NSA Surveillance [Reuters]

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord(TM) in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.