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A federal appeals court will hear oral argument Thursday in Richmond, Virginia, in the case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of a broad group of organizations challenging the National Security Agency鈥檚 mass interception and searching of Americans鈥� international internet communications.

The plaintiffs are the Wikimedia Foundation, the Rutherford Institute, The Nation magazine, Amnesty International USA, PEN America, Human Rights Watch, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Global Fund for Women, and Washington Office on Latin America.

A federal district court dismissed the lawsuit in October 2015, holding that the plaintiffs in the case had not plausibly alleged that their communications were being monitored by the NSA.

At issue is the NSA鈥檚 鈥渦pstream鈥� surveillance, which involves the NSA鈥檚 tapping into the internet backbone inside the United States 鈥� the physical infrastructure that carries Americans鈥� domestic and international online communications. The NSA conducts this spying under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the agency to engage in warrantless surveillance of Americans who communicate with targets located abroad. Section 702 is scheduled to expire at the end of 2017.

鈥嬧�淚nnocent people shouldn鈥檛 have to look over their shoulders when using the internet,鈥� said ACLU attorney Patrick Toomey, who will argue in court Thursday before a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. 鈥淭he NSA is systematically searching online communications in real-time, invading Americans鈥� privacy on a massive scale. This illegal spying undermines constitutionally protected privacy and free speech rights.鈥�

The government has argued that the plaintiffs do not have standing to challenge the surveillance because they have not adequately alleged that their communications are being intercepted. However, public disclosures and reports show that the government is copying and reviewing virtually all text-based communications entering and leaving the country, of which the plaintiffs have many.

In the course of its surveillance, the NSA copies and combs through vast amounts of internet traffic, which it intercepts inside the United States with the help of major telecommunications companies like Verizon and AT&T. The NSA searches that traffic for keywords called 鈥渟electors鈥� that are associated with tens of thousands of targets.

The district court鈥檚 ruling cited the Supreme Court鈥檚 decision in a previous ACLU lawsuit challenging the NSA鈥檚 warrantless wiretapping program, Clapper v. Amnesty. The Supreme Court dismissed that case in February 2013 in a 5鈥�4 vote on the grounds that the plaintiffs could not prove that they had been spied on.

Following Clapper, however, documents released by Edward Snowden and official government disclosures revealed the existence and breadth of upstream surveillance. Unlike the surveillance considered by the Supreme Court in Clapper, upstream surveillance is not limited to the communications of NSA targets. Instead, the NSA is searching the content of nearly all text-based internet traffic entering or leaving the country 鈥� as well as many domestic communications 鈥� looking for thousands of key terms such as email addresses or phone numbers.