Will Appeals Court Ruling Really Stop NSA Bulk Phone Data Collection?
While congress ponders the merits of the USA Freedom Act of 2015, a bill which revises the business records provisions of the Patriot Act, a panel of judges in a federal appeals court has just thrown a clump of sand into the gears of the global panopticon. Overturning an earlier ruling, where federal judges dismissed a lawsuit filed by the ACLU, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has ruled that the NSA’s bulk collection of telephone metadata is illegal.
The Good News
In their ruling the judges focused heavily on the scope of the NSA’s phone record collection program. Specifically, the written judgement describes the government’s own justification for hoovering up all of our telephone metadata (page 67):
“The government effectively argues that there is only one enormous ‘anti‐terrorism’ investigation, and that any records that might ever be of use in developing any aspect of that investigation are relevant to the overall counterterrorism effort.”
The ruling responds to this argument by noting that (page 75):
“To allow the government to collect phone records only because they may become relevant to a possible authorized investigation in the future fails even the permissive ‘relevance’ test.”
Skipping to the end, the punchline (page 82):
“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.”
In other words, the judges view Section 215 of the Patriot Act as applying to narrow inquiries that target specific people. According to the court, the bulk phone record collection currently being conducted by the government is, well, criminal.
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