The US supreme court will be asked to suspend the blanket collection of US telephone records by the FBI under an emergency petition due to be filed on Monday by civil rights campaigners at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (Epic).

This new legal challenge to the power of government agencies to spy on Americans follows the publication last month by the Guardian of a secret order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ordering Verizon to hand over metadata from its phone records.

Previous attempts to appeal against the rulings of these courts have floundered due to a lack of public information about who might be caught up in the surveillance net, but the disclosure of specific orders by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden has opened the door to a flurry of new challenges. It comes as a similar legal challenge was filed in Britain on Monday.

The latest from Epic asks the supreme court to rule that the NSA and FBI have stretched the law governing state intrusion to such a point that checks and balances put in by lawmakers have become meaningless.

Under section 1861 of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa), authorities seeking such records from phone companies must show “that there are reasonable grounds to to believe that the tangible things sought are relevant to an authorized investigation”.

But lawyers acting for Epic argue that the sweeping nature of Fisa court orders revealed by Snowden make a mockery of this “relevancy” clause.

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