A US appeals court ruled Thursday that the National Security Agency's massive collection of phone records of Americans is illegal because it exceeds the scope of what Congress authorised. The laws used as a basis for the bulk data collection "have never been interpreted to authorise anything approaching the breadth of the sweeping surveillance at issue here," the Second Circuit Court of Appeals said in a 97-page opinion.
The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union against the NSA and the FBI, following disclosures about the vast surveillance programs in documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The "metadata" collected from millions of phone calls includes the numbers called, times and other information - but not the content of conversations.
Still, civil liberties advocates argue the program is a massive intrusion on privacy while providing only minimal help in the anti-terrorism effort. The court said metadata can reveal considerable personal information such as whether a person is a victim of a crime, or "civil, political, or religious affiliations" and "whether and when he or she is involved in intimate relationships."
The New York appellate court did not address the constitutional issues of the bulk collection of phone metadata, but said the government went far beyond what Congress intended in Section 215 of the Patriot Act, a law aimed at allowing authorities to thwart terrorism. "There is no evidence that Congress intended for those statutes to authorise the bulk collection of every American's toll billing or educational records and to aggregate them into a database," the appellate panel said in the opinion.
"The interpretation that the government asks us to adopt defies any limiting principle. If the government is correct, it could use (Section) 215 to collect and store in bulk any other existing metadata available anywhere in the private sector... relating to all Americans." The law has been used by the NSA to locate people linked to potential terrorist attacks outside the United States and by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in domestic surveillance.
"This decision is a resounding victory for the rule of law," said ACLU attorney Alex Abdo, who argued the case before the three-judge panel in September. "For years, the government secretly spied on millions of innocent Americans based on a shockingly broad interpretation of its authority. The court rightly rejected the government's theory that it may stockpile information on all of us in case that information proves useful in the future." Edward Price, spokesman for President Barack Obama's National Security Council, said the administration was examining the court ruling.
"Without commenting on the ruling today, the president has been clear that he believes we should end the Section 215 bulk telephony metadata program as it currently exists by creating an alternative mechanism to preserve the program's essential capabilities without the government holding the bulk data," he said in an email.
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