The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a major US Civil Rights group, is suing the National Security Agency (NSA) over its massive communications surveillance program, revealed by a now-missing whistleblower.

This lawsuit concerns the first of last week’s two major bombshells regarding the privacy of anyone communicating with Americans via major corporate telecoms.  The ACLU alleges the NSA’s ongoing, daily collection of virtually all Verizon telephone records is unconstitutional and should stopped.

“This dragnet program is surely one of the largest surveillance efforts ever launched by a democratic government against its own citizens,” ACLU deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer said in a statement.

“It is the equivalent of requiring every American to file a daily report with the government of every location they visited, every person they talked to on the phone, the time of each call, and the length of every conversation.”

A former employee of a NSA private contractor, Edward Snowden, has claimed responsibility for leaking both the Verizon surveillance and the PRISM program, which dumps enormous amounts of customer metadata from America’s largest Internet companies into the hands of the NSA.

He had fled to Hong Kong, but checked out of his hotel and has not been seen since.