The US Supreme Court today declined to hear a bid by the operator of the popular Wikipedia internet encyclopedia to resurrect its lawsuit against the National Security Agency challenging mass online surveillance.

Turning away the Wikimedia Foundation's appeal, the justices left in place a lower court's dismissal of the lawsuit based on the government's assertion of what is called the state secrets privilege, a legal doctrine that can shut down litigation if disclosure of certain information would damage US national security.

Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, Wikimedia Foundation sued in 2015 challenging the legality of the NSA's "Upstream" surveillance of foreign targets through the "suspicionless" collection and searching of internet traffic on data transmission lines flowing into and out of the United States.