Federal judge finds NSA phone-surveillance program is likely to be unconstitutional

[unhappycamper]

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/12/16/federal-judge-finds-nsa-phone-surveillance-program-is-likely-to-be-unconstitutional/



Federal judge finds NSA phone-surveillance program is likely to be unconstitutional
By Scott Kaufman
Monday, December 16, 2013 14:22 EST

U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon — a George W. Bush appointee — ruled on Monday that the National Security Agency’s program that collects information about all phone calls in the United States likely violates the Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable search and seizures.

The lawsuit was brought on behalf of conservative legal activists Larry Klayman and Charles Strange, and concerns a FISC order from April 25, 2013 in which the NSA demanded that Klayman and Strange’s carrier, Verizon, provide the NSA on “an ongoing daily basis…all call detail records or ‘telephony metadata’ created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”

Judge Leon finds the case made by the government that Klayman and Strange have no grounds on which to bring this lawsuit to be absurd on its face. On the one hand, he writes, “[v]irtually all of the Government’s briefs and arguments to this Court explain how the Government has acted in good faith to create a comprehensive metadata database that serves as a potentially valuable tool for combating terrorism.” But on the other hand, “the Government asks me to find that the plaintiffs lack standing based on the theoretical possibility that the NSA has collected a universe of metadata so incomplete that the program could not possibly serve its putative purpose.”

“Candor of this type,” he continues, “defies common sense and does not exactly inspire confidence!”