Judge slaps NSA surveillance with stop order
Seizure of phone records ‘almost certainly’ unconstitutional, but ruling delayed
AU.S. judge has ruled that the National Security Agency’s indiscriminate, bulk seizure of U.S. residents’ telephone records is “almost certainly” unconstitutional and has issued a preliminary injunction to stop the highly controversial surveillance program.
The NSA has argued its widespread collection of phone records and, under a program called Prism, Internet data allows U.S. intelligence services to identify terrorists and uncover their plots.
“I am not convinced at this point in the litigation that the NSA’s database has ever truly served the purpose of rapidly identifying terrorists in timesensitive investigations,” U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon said in a 68-page ruling.
Leon ruled the bulk collection probably violates the U.S. Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure and requires that courts must have probable cause before issuing search warrants.
In light of the “significant national security interest at stake in this case and the novelty of the constitutional issue,” Leon ordered a delay in the execution of the injunction pending appeal from the government.
Speculating the appeal would take about six months, he warned the government that any requests for delays in appealing and ultimately complying with the injunction “will not be well received.”
The injunction bars the government from collecting any telephone “metadata” from personal accounts ob- tained from the telephone network company Verizon as part of the NSA’s bulk collection program. It also requires that the government destroy any bulk collection metadata in its possession originating from Verizon.
The ruling, if upheld, will impact the entire NSA surveillance program, which covers just bulk data collection from every telephone and Internet network in the U.S. Leon called the NSA surveillance capabilities “almost-Orwellian technology.”
The case is one of several similar suits winding their way through U.S. federal courts. They were all sparked by revelations from Edward Snowden, the former NSA contract employee who last spring fled to Russia with what the NSA says is about 1.7 million secret documents downloaded on his computer.
The NSA testified in court that it identifies only about 300 numbers for investigation each year. But Leon noted that these “seed” numbers quickly “hop,” as the NSA says, in stages to millions of other numbers, all of which are investigated and analyzed using a process called “contact-chaining.”
“It’s also easy to imagine the spiderweb-like reach of the three-hop search growing exponentially and capturing even higher numbers of phone numbers,” Leon wrote in his judgment.
He went on to say that he believes “bulk telephone metadata collection and analysis almost certainly does violate a reasonable expectation of privacy.”
“And I might add, there is the very real prospect that the program will go on for as long as America is combatting terrorism, which realistically could be forever,” he said, ending the sentence with an exclamation mark.
Snowden’s leaks, released in dribs and drabs over the last six months, reveal the colossal national and international dimensions of the NSA bulk data collections.
The White House and the NSA have claimed the leaks have been enormously damaging to U.S. security and charged him with spying. Snowden last month asked the government to drop the charges so he can testify before Congress on the NSA’s surveillance activities.
In a recent twist to this case of almost global surveillance, the lead investigator of the NSA’s task force inquiry into Snowden, Rick Ledgett, told CBS’s 60 Minutes Sunday that in order to persuade Snowden to stop leaking and come home, the government might consider amnesty.
The civil case before Judge Leon was brought by Larry Klayman, an activist and founder of Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch, and by Charles Strange, the father of Michael Strange, a former cryptologist technician for the NSA who was killed in Afghanistan while serving as support personnel for navy SEAL Team VI.
The case names U.S. President Barack Obama and his intelligence team among the defendants.