Appeals court stays U.S. judge’s ban on bulk collection of phone data
|
Version 0 of 1. A U.S. appeals court Tuesday temporarily blocked the ruling of a federal judge who this week called the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records almost certainly unconstitutional, just weeks before the program’s scheduled phase-out. The order by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit came one day after U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon of the District granted a request for an injunction and barred the NSA from collecting telephone data related to a California lawyer, J.J. Little, and his law firm. Attorneys for the Justice Department warned that it would take weeks for the NSA to make the necessary technical changes to comply with Leon’s order. The inability to hasten those technical changes, the department said, could force the agency to shut down the entire program as it approaches a Nov. 29 deadline to transition to a new system in which data is held by private telephone companies. Without a stay, “the government could be forced to abruptly terminate an important counter-intelligence program in toto,” thus creating a gap in gathering information on which the government relies “to identify and disrupt terrorist threats,” attorneys with the Justice Department’s civil division said. Under the NSA program, secretly initiated in 2001 under executive power and approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2006, the agency gathered “metadata” — telephone numbers, call times and the duration of calls — from billions of phone calls from an unknown number of large phone companies. Earlier Tuesday, Leon denied a government request to stay his order pending appeal, saying authorities had had 22 months to prepare for his decision since he first ruled in December 2013 in favor of plaintiffs, led by conservative legal activist Larry Klayman. Leon called the NSA program “almost Orwellian,” and an “astounding” and “unparalleled” example of dragnet surveillance that violated millions of Americans’ privacy rights. Circuit judges David S. Tatel, Thomas B. Griffith and Patricia A. Millett granted an administrative stay and directed the government and plaintiffs to respond by Friday and Monday, respectively, on whether the court should enter a full stay pending appeal. Under challenges from the courts in recent years, Congress approved legislation in June to end the existing program after a transition period. Under the new USA Freedom Act, records collection is scheduled to shift to private telephone companies by Nov. 29, at which point the government must obtain court approval for targeted query information. |