US govt sued

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging the constitutionality of the US government surveillance programme that collects the telephone records of millions of Americans from US telecommunications companies, The Washington Post reports.
It is the first substantive lawsuit following reports in The Washington Post and the Guardian last week that detailed two vast surveillance programmes run by the National Security Agency under laws authorised by Congress after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
The ACLU suit, filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, challenges the legality of the spy agency's collection of customer “metadata,” including the phone numbers dialled and the length of calls, according the Post report published yesterday.
The lawsuit asks the court to force the government to end the programme and purge any records it has collected, and to declare that the surveillance is unconstitutional.
Meanwhile, whistleblower Edward Snowden yesterday vowed to fight any US bid to extradite him from Hong Kong and promised new revelations about US surveillance targets, the South China Morning Post reported.
"I'm neither traitor nor hero. I'm an American," the Hong Kong newspaper's website quoted him as saying in an exclusive interview.
The SCMP, in a teaser posted online before it publishes the full interview, said the former subcontractor for the National Security Agency would offer "more explosive details on US surveillance targets".
Snowden would also discuss his fears for his family and his immediate plans, the newspaper said, after it interviewed the 29-year-old one-time CIA analyst earlier yesterday at a secret location in the semi-autonomous Chinese territory.
Many lawmakers in Washington are up in arms after Snowden leaked the NSA's monitoring of private users' web traffic and phone records, in a worldwide trawl that the White House says was needed to keep Americans safe from terror.
Criminal investigations are underway, but so far the United States has not filed a formal extradition request to Hong Kong, a former British colony that retained its separate legal system when it returned to Chinese rule in 1997.
The Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, described Snowden's leaks as a "giant" violation of law.
"He's a traitor," Boehner told ABC News in an interview. "The disclosure of this information puts Americans at risk. It shows our adversaries what our capabilities are."
However, US lawmakers voiced their confusion and concern, and some called for the end of sweeping surveillance programs after receiving an unusual briefing on the government's years-long collection of phone records and Internet usage.
Some congressmen admitted they'd been caught unawares by the scope of the programs, having skipped previous briefings by the intelligence committees.
“I think Congress has really found itself a little bit asleep at the wheel,” Democratic Rep Steve Cohen of Tennessee said.
Many leaving the briefing declared themselves disturbed by what they'd heard and in need of more answers.
“Congress needs to debate this issue and determine what tools we give to our intelligence community to protect us from a terrorist attack,” said Rep CA Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, and a backer of the surveillance.