Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Wikimedia Foundation executive director Lila Tretikova announced that they are filing a lawsuit against the National Security Agency (NSA).

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales (Photo: Getty Images)

“Today we will file a lawsuit against the National Security Agency to protect the rights of the 500 million people who use Wikipedia every month. We do this because the foundation of democracy is the free exchange of knowledge and ideas,” Wales and Tretikova wrote in an article published in The New York Times .

“In the lawsuit we are bringing with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, we join as plaintiffs a broad coalition of human rights activists, civil society, legal, media and news organizations. Their jobs, like ours, require participation in sensitive Internet communications with people outside the United States. Therefore, we ask the court to oblige the NSA to end its surveillance of Internet traffic,” said the founders of Wikipedia.

The lawsuit states that the NSA, by engaging in mass surveillance of Internet traffic, violates the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, which protects the right to privacy, as well as the First Amendment, which protects freedom of expression and association. Its purpose is to protect the anonymity of volunteers working on the project and users reading Wikipedia articles.

“Most people find and read Wikipedia anonymously because you don't need an account to browse tens of millions of articles in hundreds of languages. Every month, at least 75,000 volunteers in the United States and around the world dedicate their time and passion to writing these articles and maintaining the site—and the number is growing. On our servers, run by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, volunteers discuss their work on everything from Tiananmen Square to gay rights in Uganda. Many of them prefer to work anonymously, especially those who work on controversial issues or who live in countries with repressive governments,” Wales and Tretikova point out.

“These volunteers must be able to do their work without fear of the United States government monitoring what they read and write. Unfortunately, their anonymity is far from guaranteed because the NSA, through its surveillance techniques, intercepts virtually all international text traffic passing through the backbone of the Internet within the United States. It is a network of fiber optic cables that connect Wikipedia to its global community of readers and editors,” write Wikipedia’s founders.

“As a result, whenever someone abroad views or edits a Wikipedia page, it is likely that the NSA is monitoring those activities, including the content of what was read or typed, as well as other information that may be associated with a person's physical location or possible identity. These actions are confidential and private: they can reveal everything about a person - from his political and religious beliefs to sexual orientation and health status,” the article emphasizes.

The NYT notes that one of the documents published by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden identifies Wikipedia as a surveillance target along with other major sites such as CNN.com, Gmail and Facebook.

“The harm to Wikimedia and the hundreds of millions of people who visit our sites is clear: widespread surveillance has a chilling effect. It stifles the freedom of speech and free exchange of knowledge for which Wikimedia was created,” write Wales and Tretikova.

The founder of Wikipedia accused the NSA of violating the constitution