US court rules NSA surveillance program illegal

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US court rules NSA surveillance program illegal

Big News Network.comThursday 7th May, 2015

WASHINGTON A federal appeals court in New York on Thursday ruled that the National Security Agency's collection of millions of Americans' phone records is illegal.

The decision comes amid a growing fight in Congress over whether to replace the NSA program, or to extend it without changes.

In a 97-page ruling, a three-judge panel for the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that a law Congress passed allowing collection of information relevant to terrorism investigations does not authorize the so-called "bulk collection" of phone records on the scale of the NSA program.

The three-judge panel overturned a lower court and determined that the government had stretched the meaning of statute to enable "sweeping surveillance" of Americans' data in "staggering" volumes.

Judge Gerard Lynch said allowing the government to gather data in a blanket fashion was not consistent with the statute used to carry out the program: Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

"The interpretation urged by the government would require a drastic expansion of the term 'relevance,' not only with respect to 215, but also as that term is construed for purposes of subpoenas, and of a number of national security-related statutes, to sweep further than those statutes have ever been thought to reach," Lynch wrote in an opinion joined by Judges Robert Sack and Vernon Broderick.

The ruling doesn't immediately halt the domestic phone records surveillance program. Unless it is overturned by a higher court, the ruling could signal the program's end. It would also force Congress to choose whether it wishes to explicitly authorize the program when the Patriot Act comes up for renewal on June 1.

"We hold that the text of 215 cannot bear the weight the government asks us to assign to it, and that it does not authorize the telephone metadata program," the ruling reads.

"We do so comfortably in the full understanding that if Congress chooses to authorize such a far-reaching and unprecedented program, it has every opportunity to do so, and to do so unambiguously. Until such time as it does so, however, we decline to deviate from widely accepted interpretations of well-established legal standards."

The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union against the NSA and FBI, following disclosures about the vast surveillance programs in documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The lawsuit had been dismissed by a lower court in 2013, but the three appellate judges overruled decision.

Civil liberties advocates argue the 215 metadata surveillance program is a massive intrusion on privacy while providing only minimal help in the anti-terrorism effort.

The court said metadata could reveal considerable personal information such as whether a person was a victim of a crime, or "civil, political, or religious affiliations" and "whether and when he or she is involved in intimate relationships".

The House appears ready to pass a bill next week that would end the government's bulk collection of phone records. That bill, known as the U.S.A. Freedom Act, would replace it with a new program that would preserve the NSA's ability to analyze links between callers to hunt for terrorists, but keep the bulk records in the hands of phone companies, which would be free to dispose of them after 18 months. The NSA keeps them for five years, writes NYT.

[umbertino]

I'm very happy for the American People....