Court Strikes Down NSA’s Bulk Phone Collection

A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of telephone data violates federal law.

The national debate over government surveillance has largely focused on the NSA program’s constitutionality. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit instead weighed it against Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, and found it exceeds the boundaries of that law.

That section of the landmark post-9/11 law streamlines intelligence agencies’ right to legal seizure of business records “that are relevant to an ongoing foreign intelligence investigation.” Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, author of the USA PATRIOT Act, has himself argued in an amicus brief for the case that the current NSA harvesting of all information on Americans’ phone calls is too broad to meet the law’s standards, asking, “How can every call that every American makes or receives be relevant to a specific investigation?”

The court noted that Edward Snowden’s exposure of the program’s details played a crucial role, pointing out in the decision that “Americans first learned” of the NSA’s metadata collection through Snowden’s leaks to British newspaper The Guardian in 2013.

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