Visitors of Assange Allowed to Continue Lawsuit Against CIA Surveillance, Judge Rules

If you’re tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. A US judge has allowed four persons who visited whistleblower and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange while he was residing in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to continue their legal battle against the CIA, which was launched in the summer of 2022. The four – journalists John Goetz and Charles Glass, as well as attorneys Margaret Ratner Kunstler and Deborah Hrbek – allege that the agency spied on them during the visits. District Court Judge John Koeltl made this decision in response to the CIA asking the Manhattan court to dismiss the case. We obtained a copy of the decision for you here. The filing accuses the spies of gaining access to data copied from their phones without their knowledge, and Judge Koeltl agreed that, if this occurred, it was an act of unconstitutional privacy violation, therefore representing sufficient grounds for the lawsuit to proceed. Spain’s El Pais originally reported that a contractor harvested information using hidden microphones and accessing the phones, and then turned it over to the CIA. The judge specified that Assange’s visitors had “reasonable expectation of privacy” regarding the data on their phones and that this is guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment (which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures). The ruling allowed the part of the lawsuit that would, if the final verdict goes in favor of the plaintiffs, force the CIA to destroy whatever information they unlawfully obtained from the…Visitors of Assange Allowed to Continue Lawsuit Against CIA Surveillance, Judge Rules