Bang! Hammer drops on Obama's
NSA snoops, Federal judge rules against phone
surveillance, by Bob Unruh, 11/9/15, WND
A federal judge on Monday ordered
the National Security Agency to stop collecting telephone records for some of
the citizens who sued the government after Edward Snowden leaked details of the
vast sweep of private data.
The ruling from U.S. District Judge
Richard Leon comes almost two years after he issued an injunction to halt the
program. At that time, he stayed his injunction to give the government time to
appeal.
But the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals took most of that time to decide on a secondary issue, and even though
the collection program is about to expire and be replaced by a new set of
rules, Leon said enough is enough.
“I will grant plaintiffs J.J. Little
and J.J. Little & Associates’ requests for an injunction and enter an order
consistent with this opinion that (1) bars the government from collecting, as
part of the NSA’s Bulk Telephony Metadata Program, any telephony metadata
associated with these plaintiffs’ Verizon Business Network Services accounts
and (2) requires the government to segregate any such metadata in its
possession that has already been collected.”
Leon explained that in his December
2013 opinion, he stayed his order “pending appeal in light of the national
security interests at stake and the novelty of the constitutional issues
raised.”
“I did so with the optimistic hope
that the appeals process would move expeditiously,” he said. “However, because
it has been almost two years since I first found that the NSA’s Bulk Telephony
Metadata Program likely violates the Constitution and because the loss of
constitutional freedoms for even one day is a significant harm … I will not do
so today.”
He said the plaintiffs are likely to
succeed on the merits of their Fourth Amendment claim. Leon noted the
importance of protecting the Fourth Amendment and concluded he could not “allow
the government to trump the Constitution merely because it suits the exigencies
of the moment.”
He continued, “To be sure, the very
purpose of the Fourth Amendment would be undermined were this court to defer to
Congress’s determination that individual liberty should be sacrificed to better
combat today’s evil.”
In the program, the NSA monitors the
telephone numbers used in calls in an effort to identify potential national
security threats. The program was exposed by former NSA contractor and document
leaker Edward Snowden, who has sought refuge in Russia. Several plaintiffs
sued, and Leon ruled the program is likely unconstitutional. The case was sent
up to the appeals court, which sat on it for months.
A replacement program, adopted by
Congress and scheduled to begin at the end of November, essentially has the
telephone companies keep the records and give them to the government according
to a protocol.
The appeals court ordered the case
back to Leon to determine whether discovery would be helpful. The most
significant issue raised at the appellate level was that the plaintiffs were
customers of Verizon Wireless, while it was the company’s business network that
was identified as a participant in the data-collection program.
Attorney Larry Klayman of Freedom Watch, who brought the case on behalf of himself and other
plaintiffs, then added the business network customers to the lawsuit.
Leon pointed out that “although the
daily bulk collection, storage and analysis of telephony metadata is not
expressly authorized” by the law, the government went ahead with the program.
“This is one of the most significant
cases in the history of litigation against the government,” Klayman said. “Never
before in American history have people been subjected to such egregious violations
of their constitutional rights,” he said. “Thank God that there are judges like
Leon who will stand up for the American people. Without this, revolution is
almost assured if more judges do not start to do their job, like Leon, and
protect the citizenry from government tyranny.”
For Klayman himself and a couple
other plaintiffs, the judge said there was not enough evidence of their own
injury. The judge explained that documentation about the secret program’s
efforts to obtain their specific information was not in evidence.
But for the Little plaintiffs, there
was no such hurdle. “Given the strong presumption that the NSA collected, and
warehoused, the Little plaintiff’s data within the past five years, these
plaintiffs unquestionably have standing to enjoin any future queries of that
data,” Leon wrote.
He said neither adjustments
President Obama made in the program, nor its scheduled demise in weeks,
nor the replacement data collection program coming soon, alters his analysis
that the actions violate the Fourth Amendment.
“The fact remains that
indiscriminate, daily bulk collection, long-term retention, and analysis of
telephony metadata almost certainly violates a person’s reasonable expectation
of privacy,” he said.
He called it “a sweeping, and truly
astounding program that targets millions of Americans arbitrarily and
indiscriminately.”
He said its “absurd to suggest the
Constitution favors, or even tolerates, such extreme measures!” Finally, he
said, Americans were kept in the dark by the government.
“The program was, and continues to
be shrouded in secret,” he wrote. “This may, of course, be practically
necessary for the program to be effective, but it nevertheless increases the
level of the privacy intrusion.” Worse, he added, the results of the
government’s efforts are nil.
“To date, the government has still
not cited a single instance in which telephone metadata analysis actually
stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the government in achieving any
time-sensitive objective.”
WND
reported when Klayman expressed the desire
for the government “to obey the Fourth Amendment.” Klayman wrote that a
preliminary injunction is needed so that the government “can be held to obey
the law, and can be held in contempt, if necessary.” He said requiring the
government to follow the Fourth Amendment “is not too much to ask.”
Klayman said the fact that the USA
Patriot Act, under which the spying has been done, is expiring and is being
replaced by the USA Freedom Act, does not matter.
The analysis remains, he wrote,
“because the government defendants do not admit to any limitation from those
particular statutes on … spying on plaintiffs and other U.S. citizens who have
no connection to terrorism.”
In Leon’s original injunction, he
called the program “almost Orwellian.” Klayman originally sued the NSA, Barack
Obama, then-Attorney General Eric Holder and a number of other federal
officials. Other defendants include NSA chief Keith Alexander, U.S. Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court Judge Roger Vinson, Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper, CIA chief John Brennan, FBI chief James Comey, the
Department of Justice, the CIA and the FBI.
Plaintiffs in the case include
Klayman, Charles and Mary Ann Strange, Michael Ferrari, Matt Garrison and J.J.
Little.
Two
of America’s influential civil-rights groups,
the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, have sided with Klayman.
The data that the NSA collects, they
explained in a brief, “reveals political affiliation, religious practices and
peoples’ most intimate associations.” “It reveals who calls a suicide
prevention line and who calls their elected official; who calls the local
tea-party office and who calls Planned Parenthood.”
The groups’ brief said “the relevant
fact for whether an expectation of privacy exists is that the comprehensive
telephone records the government collects – not just the records of a few calls
over a few days but all of a person’s calls over many years – reveals highly
personal information about the person and her life.”
http://www.wnd.com/2015/11/federal-judge-rules-against-nsa-phone-surveillance/
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