Judge Deals Blow to NSA Phone Spying

A federal judge on Monday ruled against the National Security Agency's collection of phone records, saying the program "almost certainly does violate" the Constitution. However, the ruling will have little immediate effect and faces a lengthy future of court proceedings. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, who was nominated to the Washington, D.C., bench by former President George W. Bush, issued a 68-page ruling in favor of Larry Klayman, a conservative activist and lawyer. Mr. Klayman filed suit in June, claiming that the program violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search. On a daily basis, the NSA collects records of nearly every call made in the U.S. and enters them into a database in order to search for possible contacts among terrorism suspects. The scope of the program was revealed when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents describing the program this spring. The ruling came on Mr. Klayman's request for an injunction barring the government from collecting any telephone records associated with Mr. Klayman and another plaintiff. In the ruling, Judge Leon ordered the government to destroy any such records it currently has. However, "in light of the significant national security interests at stake in this case and the novelty of the constitutional issues,'' the judge suspended his own order while the government pursues an expected appeal. In issuing his ruling, the judge disagreed with a central premise of the program's defenders—that a 1979 Supreme Court ruling allowing investigators to look at the phone records of a Maryland robbery suspect gave them the authority to collect phone records of nearly every American. Judge Leon ruled that the technology of both phones and phone surveillance has changed so much in the intervening years that the Smith decision is of little value in assessing the NSA program. "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: "I believe that bulk telephony metadata collection and analysis almost certainly does violate a reasonable expectation of privacy.''...more