Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has decided that he’s not going to take this whole telephone metadata collection thing lying down, and he wants the American public to join him.

On Wednesday, Sen. Paul and the conservative group FreedomWorks filed a class action lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia against President Barack Obama and various other members of the intelligence community, arguing that the National Security Agency’s metadata dragnet is unconstitutional and should be halted. The suit also says that all records should be purged.

The case states:

The type and quantum of evidence needed to satisfy the “reasonable articulable suspicion” threshold to initiate a query by the NSA officials based on a seed is not publicly known. While the results to not identify the individuals or organizations associated with responsive telephone numbers, their identities (including the identities of Plaintiffs and class members) can be readily discovered outside the Mass Associated Tracking Program. When cross-checked against other public records, telephone metadata can reveal a person’s name, address, driver’s license, credit history, social security number, and other information.

This case is one of at least three federal lawsuits that have been filed since the Edward Snowden revelations first appeared last summer. So far, two federal judges have disagreed about the constitutionality of the program. Other cases remain pending through the federal judicial system, and it seems that it will only be a matter of time before one of them is heard by the Supreme Court.

One case the Paul suit refers to is Klayman v. Obama, which received a ruling from a federal judge in December 2013. In that case, Judge Richard Leon, a district judge in Washington, DC, concluded:

Indeed, the question in this case can more properly be styled as follows: when do present-day circumstances—the evolutions in the Government's surveillance capabilities, citizens' phone habits, and the relationship between the NSA and telecom companies—become so thoroughly unlike those considered by the Supreme Court 34 years ago that a precedent like Smith simply does not apply? The answer, unfortunately for the government, is now.

Questions remain

Some attorneys and civil liberties groups lauded the new suit but have questions about its effectiveness.

“Needless to say, we agree that the NSA’s phone-records program is unconstitutional,” said Jameel Jaffer, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union.

“Mass surveillance of this kind infringes not just on privacy rights but on the freedoms of speech and association as well. We’ve advanced these arguments in our own lawsuit against the NSA, and over the next few weeks we’ll make them to a federal appeals court.”

Mark Rumold, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, echoed this sentiment.

“I don't think it's going to change much legally, but it certainly adds something atmospherically to have a senator lead a class action against the president and the intelligence community,” he told Ars. “I just hope this doesn't distract from the great work Senator Paul has done advocating for NSA reform in the Senate. I still think that's where he's uniquely positioned to make his most valuable contribution to reining in the NSA.”

Similarly, Fred Cate, a law professor at Indiana University, told Ars that while he agrees with the spirit of the case, he is also “confident it is going nowhere.”

“There is no statutory or other legal basis for a court to issue a declaratory judgment that an action violates the Fourth Amendment,” he told Ars. “There probably should be—it would help eliminate the difficulty that Fourth Amendment wrongs are almost always raised by criminal defendants who wish a court to suppress evidence that was collected illegally—but there just isn't at present. Moreover, a class action is hardly a likely vehicle to encourage a court to venture into new territory, because how could a court declare for a large unspecified class something about the legality of a search?”