Second Circuit Rules Against Mass Collection Of Phone Records

Ken AshfordConstitution, Wiretapping & SurveillanceLeave a Comment

I haven’t written much about Ed Snowden and the huge, perhaps unconstitutional, mass surveillance of Americans, but this is too noteworthy to ignore:

A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that the National Security Agency’s controversial collection of Americans’ phone records, first revealed by Edward Snowden, is not legal under the Patriot Act.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals held in the case, which was brought by the ACLU, that the telephone metadata collection program “exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized.” The Court did not rule on a larger Constitutional issue and sent the case back down to a lower court for further proceedings.

The program gathers up bulk telephone records to enable targeted searches based on telephone numbers or other identifiers associated with terrorist organizations.

A three judge panel held that the text of the Patriot Act “cannot bear the weight the government asks us to assign to it and that it does not authorize the telephone meta date program.”

The Court said, “We do so comfortably in the full understanding that if Congress choses to authorize such a far-reaching and unprecedented program, it has every opportuntiy to do so, unambiguously. Until such times as it does so, however, we decline to deviate from widely accepted interpretations of well-established legal standards. ”

“This is a landmark ruling and it critically important decision, what it means going forward depends entirely on Congress, because this provision was set to expire on June 1st anyway,” said Steve Vladeck of American University.

The Court said it wouldn’t block the provision while the case is reconsidered at the lower court.

I would disagree that this is a “landmark ruling” because the Second Circuit did not reach the important Constitutional issue.  But it is important

The reason I haven’t written much about these mass surveillance issues is because I am largely on the fence about them.  If the NSA gathers up all the data relating to phone conversations — i.e., all conversations of everybody as to when and who they called and how long they talked — and that data sat on a computer somewhere and was never looked at by a pair of eyes until it became necessary (which it wasn’t 99.999999% of the time), is that an invasion of privacy that violates the Constitution?  I don’t know, but I tend to think not.  I tend not to give a damn.

And what if the conversations, texts, etc. themselves are collected?  Again, not sure I care.

But I can see why others might disagree.