SurveillanceNSA phone metadata collection program “likely violates constitution”: Judge

Washington, D.C. district court judge Richard Leon, ruling on Monday against the National Security Agency (NSA), said that the agency’s bulk phone metadata collection “likely violates the constitution.”

Judge Leon, ruling in a case brought by conservative activist attorney Larry Klayman, said that the NSA must immediately end collecting the defendants’ information. Leon said he believed it was “substantially likely” that “the program is unlawful,” and that in that event, “the plaintiffs have suffered concrete harm traceable to the challenged program.”

The New York Times reports that in October, a different panel of judges in a similar but separate case ruled in favor of the NSA. The federal appeals court in New York, in its 30 October decision, had declined to weigh in on the constitutional issues, saying it would be imprudent to interfere with an orderly transition to a replacement system after 29 November, as mandated by Congress.

One result of Leon’s ruling is that the NSA must also quarantine the metadata related to Klayman the agency has already collected.

A Department of Justice spokesman said: “The government is reviewing the decision.”

The NSA bulk metadata collection came to light through Edward Snowden’s leaked documents, and it is due to end on 29 November. Judge Leon said, however, that the largely symbolic ruling was important considering the high stakes. “With the government’s authority to operate the bulk telephony metadata program quickly coming to an end, this case is perhaps the last chapter in the judiciary’s evaluation of this particular program’s compatibility with the Constitution,” he wrote. Klayman v Obama would not “be the last chapter in the ongoing struggle to balance privacy rights and national security interests under our Constitution in an age of evolving technological wizardry,” he said.

Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center, told the Times that “It may seem symbolic, but it isn’t, because there is tangible harm … There would be new data collected and stored for five years, and that’s not nothing.”

Gotein added that the ruling “says you can’t just sort-of comply with the law, which is what the government had been saying it was going to do. There’s not wiggle room in the constitution.”