In the EFF's lawsuit against the NSA over domestic surveillance, the organization has filed 22 first hand examples of organizations which have directly experienced the chilling effects of the surveillance program, which the EFF reasonably argues shows how the program violates the Constitutional right to freely associate. There are numerous examples of public interest groups discovering that members or community members have curtailed communication, declined membership or used other ways of cutting off contact, as they now fear the threat of potential "guilt by association." Once again, this is the kind of stuff that isn't supposed to happen in America, and it's another reason why the surveillance efforts are so pernicious.
"The plaintiffs, like countless other associations across the country, have suffered real and concrete harm because they have lost the ability to assure their constituents that the fact of their telephone communications between them will be kept confidential from the federal government," EFF Senior Staff Attorney David Greene said. "This has caused constituents to reduce their calling. This is exactly the type of chilling effect on the freedom of association that the First Amendment forbids."
These cases tend to take a while, but the chilling effects are happening now, are very real and are going to continue until the NSA is stopped from its overaggressive surveillance.
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