A federal judge defended the National Security Agency’s...
A federal judge defended the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone metadata in a ruling Friday by U.S. District Judge William Pauley in Manhattan in American Civil Liberties Union v. James Clapper. The ACLU plans to appeal the ruling…
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and make its case in the 2nd Circuit in New York, it said (http://bit.ly/1jQfh2Q). “This blunt tool only works because it collects everything,” Pauley said, judging the program lawful while acknowledging the danger to privacy if the program were unchecked (http://bit.ly/Jxc9Ig). “The question of whether that program should be conducted is for the other two coordinate branches of Government to decide,” he said, citing the “extensive oversight” the program operates under. The court granted the government’s motion to dismiss the ACLU’s complaint, filed in June. He lamented the “level of absurdity” in ACLU’s lawsuit given the group only learned of the program through leaks earlier in the year. “A target’s awareness of Section 215 orders does not alter the Congressional calculus,” Pauley wrote. He defended the ability of intelligence officials to make connections on the basis of metadata collection: “The effectiveness of bulk telephony metadata collection cannot be seriously disputed.” What corporations do with consumer data is “far more intrusive,” he said. He said the program does not violate the Fourth Amendment, pointing to the 1979 Smith v. Maryland Supreme Court case, or the First Amendment, calling the need to determine that “unnecessary” due to another previous ruling. The court’s decision “misinterprets the relevant statutes, understates the privacy implications of the government’s surveillance and misapplies a narrow and outdated precedent to read away core constitutional protections,” said Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director, in a statement. “As another federal judge and the president’s own review group concluded last week, the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of telephony data constitutes a serious invasion of Americans’ privacy.” The phone surveillance program, done under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, has been upheld by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court multiple times, but a federal court shot it down as likely unconstitutional in Klayman v. Obama earlier this month. Lawmakers and the White House have reexamined the program and announced intentions to change it.