Seventeen computer and data scientists, mostly academics, filed...

Seventeen computer and data scientists, mostly academics, filed an amicus brief Thursday to the U.S. District Court in New York on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union in its lawsuit against government intelligence officials over their phone metadata collection program (http://bit.ly/1fx9Aie). “It is not just metadata,” they said. “Telephony metadata reveals private and sensitive information about people.” Government assurances it’s not listening in on telephone calls “is cold comfort,” they said. The ACLU filed its lawsuit last year after NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed a trove of documents detailing government surveillance programs, according to an ACLU release (http://bit.ly/1dWxS8S).