A U.S. court has sent seventeen lawsuits filed against telephone companies in various jurisdictions for allegedly breaking the law in assisting the government in domestic surveillance to San Francisco to join another lawsuit already in progress there.

The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation sent the class-action lawsuits, filed in 13 different district courts around the country, to the Northern District of California, where the Electronic Frontier Foundation has brought suit against AT&T for its alleged cooperation in the National Security Agency’s terrorist surveillance program in which the agency listens to certain telephone calls entering the U.S. from other countries.

“We conclude that the Northern District of California is an appropriate transferee forum in this docket because the district is where the first filed and significantly more advanced action is pending before a judge already well versed in the issues presented by the litigation,” the panel said in an August 9 order.

The government and telephone companies had sought to move the cases to a Washington, D.C. court while a plaintiff’s attorney asked the California judge handle the cases. — Reuters

District Court Judge Vaughn Walker last month rejected the governmnent’s motion to dismiss the EFF case under the state secrets privilege, but agreed to stay further proceedings until the government could appeal.

Most of the lawsuits were filed after an April USA TODAY story alleging that Verizon, AT&T and BellSouth provided telephone call detail records to the NSA without legal authority. BellSouth denied the allegations, and USA TODAY later retracted the allegation that BellSouth and Verizon were involved.