Update:
Judge Pauley’s 54-page written opinion can be read in its entirety here.
The following are excerpts gathered from various news media (not necessarily in order of appearance in the ruling):
“The government learned from its mistake and adapted to confront a new enemy: a terror network capable of orchestrating attacks across the world. It launched a number of counter-measures, including a bulk telephony metadata collection program — a wide net that could find and isolate gossamer contacts among suspected terrorists in an ocean of seemingly disconnected data…”
“This blunt tool only works because it collects everything…The collection is broad, but the scope of counterterrorism investigations is unprecedented.”
…[the mass collection of phone data] “significantly increases the NSA’s capability to detect the faintest patterns left behind by individuals affiliated with foreign terrorist organizations. Armed with all the metadata, NSA can draw connections it might otherwise never be able to find…As the Sept. 11 attacks demonstrate, the cost of missing such a threat can be horrific.”
[the attacks] “revealed, in the starkest terms, just how dangerous and interconnected the world is. While Americans depended on technology for the conveniences of modernity, al-Qaida plotted in a seventh-century milieu to use that technology against us. It was a bold jujitsu. And it succeeded because conventional intelligence gathering could not detect diffuse filaments connecting al-Qaida.”
But Pauley also said [such a program, if unchecked,] “imperils the civil liberties of every citizen…”
“The question for this court is whether the government’s bulk telephony metadata program is lawful. This court finds it is. But the question of whether that program should be conducted is for the other two coordinate branches of government to decide…”
Pauley also notes “the government repudiates any notion that it conducts the type of data mining the ACLU warns about in its parade of horribles.”
On Snowden: “It cannot possibly be that lawbreaking conduct by a government contractor that reveals state secrets — including the means and methods of intelligence gathering — could frustrate Congress’s intent. To hold otherwise would spawn mischief…”
On the argument that the phone data collection program is too broad and contains too much irrelevant information: “That argument has no traction here. Because without all the data points, the government cannot be certain it connected the pertinent ones…Here, there is no way for the government to know which particle of telephony metadata will lead to useful counterterrorism information. When that is the case, courts routinely authorize large-scale collections of information, even if most of it will not directly bear on the investigation.”
Main Source: NPR
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Original Post:
A federal judge in New York today ruled that the National Security Agency’s program that is systematically keeping phone records of all Americans is lawful, creating a conflict among lower courts and increasing the likelihood that the issue will be resolved by the Supreme Court.
Judge William H. Pauley III of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York said that protections under the Fourth Amendment do not apply to records held by third parties, like phone companies.
The New York Times:
The ruling comes nearly two weeks after Judge Richard J. Leon of Federal District Court for the District of Columbia said the program most likely violated the Fourth Amendment. As part of the ruling, Judge Leon ordered the government to stop collecting data on two plaintiffs who brought the case against the government.
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While Judge Leon ordered the government to stop collecting data on the two plaintiffs, he stayed the ruling, giving the government time to appeal the decision.
Read more here
Image: www.shutterstock.com
