Judge Says NSA's 'Almost-Orwellian' Data Collection Likely Violates Constitution

For the first time, a public court has determined that the National Security Agency's collection of metadata on Americans' phone calls probably violates the Constitution and should be stopped.

That's the short version of a ruling on the NSA's bulk collection of phone records released by the D.C. District Court on Monday. The injunction ruling determined that the plaintiffs had standing to file a lawsuit — in other words, that they were affected by the NSA's data collection — and that a court would likely find that the collection violated the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. Given that the plaintiffs suffered "irreparable harm" from the data collection, the court determined that the data collection should be halted — though that order was withheld, pending appeal.

The decision, responding to a lawsuit initiated by Judicial Watch's Larry Klayman, was written by U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee. Leon doesn't mince words in his critique, suggesting that the technology involved renders past judicial determinations inapplicable. The NSA gathers on-going data on phone calls placed and their length, the sort of thing that once needed to be done on a line-by-line basis.

"[T]he almost-Orwellian technology that enables the Government to store and analyze the phone metadata of every telephone user in the United States," Leon writes, "is unlike anything that could have been conceived in 1979," when the Supreme Court case of Smith v. Maryland first allowed the government to collect such data. "The notion that the Government could collect similar data on hundreds of millions of people and retain that data for a five-year period, updating it with new data every day in perpetuity, was at best, in 1979, the stuff of science fiction."

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