Motion to dismiss filed in NSA spying class action …

WASHINGTON (Legal Newsline) The defendants have filed their motion to dismiss in a lawsuit that alleges the National Security Agency conducted surveillance and intelligence-gathering programs that collected data from American citizens.

As an initial matter, the court should dismiss this case on grounds of claim-splitting, according to the memo.

Klayman

(T)he complaint in this case is a near carbon copy of the complaint in Klayman v. Obama, Civ. No. 13-0881 (Klayman II), overlaps substantially with the complaint in Klayman v. Obama, Civ. No. 13-0851 (Klayman I), and can only be explained as an attempt to evade the deadline under the local rules to move for class certification in those two cases, the memo states.

Plaintiffs cannot maintain more than one action involving the same subject matter at the same time in the same court and against the same defendants.

The plaintiffs complaint also should be dismissed for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction, according to the memo.

They have not alleged sufficient facts to demonstrate that information about their calls has been acquired or reviewed by the NSA under the bulk telephony metadata program, and any fear they might have that the NSA may in some way misuse data allegedly collected about their calls is neither a cognizable injury nor fairly traceable to the programs actual operation.

Similarly, the plaintiffs have not established that the NSA acquired or reviewed information about their communications under the bulk Internet metadata program, nor can they seek prospective injunctive relief when the program has been discontinued and the collected data destroyed, according to the memo.

As to PRISM collection of the communications of non-U.S. persons located abroad, this court has already ruled, on almost identical allegations, that plaintiffs do not have standing to challenge that program, the memo states. And Plaintiffs vague and speculative allegations about a claimed program they call MUSCULAR are also insufficient to confer standing under Article III.

The governments interest in identifying terrorist operatives and intercepting their communications to prevent terrorist attacks is a national security concern that far outweighs any residual privacy interest that the plaintiffs may have in their communications not already protected by the Fourth Amendment, and by the same token outweighs any risk of erroneous deprivation of that interest, according to the memo.

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Motion to dismiss filed in NSA spying class action ...