A federal judge in the US ruled that the National Security Agency's collection of phone records "almost certainly" violates the Constitution. US District Judge Richard Leon labeled as "almost Orwellian" the NSA's bulk phone-surveillance program, the Wall Street Journal reports. The ruling, in US District Court in Washington, DC, will have little immediate legal effect because the judge stayed the opinion until an expected government appeal is heard. However, it will add momentum to other court cases brought against the widespread surveillance as well as efforts in Congress to bring the NSA under tighter control.
Bulk collection of phone records was first authorized by the Patriot Act, passed by Congress after the 2001 terror attacks, and then was placed under the supervision of a secret foreign intelligence court in 2006. The vast extent of the surveillance was revealed earlier this year by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Judge Leon ruled in favor of Larry Klayman, a lawyer who founded the groups Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch. Klayman filed suit in June, claiming that the program violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search. The judge disagreed with a central premise of the NSA programme's defenders, that a 1979 Supreme Court ruling allowing investigators to look at the phone records of a robbery suspect also gave them authority to collect phone records of nearly every American. Leon found the technology of phones and phone surveillance has changed so much in the intervening years that the earlier ruling, Smith vs Maryland, is of little value in assessing the NSA programme.
"The almost-Orwellian technology that enables the government to store and analyze the phone metadata of every telephone user in the United States is unlike anything that could have been conceived in 1979," the judge wrote, adding that such bulk data collection and analysis "almost certainly does violate a reasonable expectation of privacy." Government lawyers don't cite "a single instance in which analysis of the NSA's bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the government in achieving any objective that was time-sensitive in nature", the judge said.
A Justice Department spokesman said lawyers there have seen the opinion and are reviewing it. "We believe the program is constitutional as previous judges have found," the spokesman said. President Barack Obama will meet on 17 December executives from Google, Facebook and Twitter to try to address their concerns about America's surveillance operations.
