The NSA can continue its bulk collection of telephone metadata—a program a federal judge slammed as “almost Orwellian”—the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said on Friday.
The decision allowing for a three-month continuation marks the 36th time the court has authorized this surveillance program.
In a statement issued Friday, the office of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper stated:
That contrary ruling was issued last month by U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon, who declared, “I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary invasion’ than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying it and analyzing it without judicial approval.”
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“We continue to believe that the NSA’s call-tracking program violates both statutory law and the Constitution.”
—Jameel Jaffer, ACLU”We continue to believe that the NSA’s call-tracking program violates both statutory law and the Constitution,” the ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer told the Washington Post. “While the government has a legitimate interest in tracking the associations of suspected terrorists, tracking those associations does not require the government to subject every citizen to permanent surveillance.”
In a separate decision on Friday, an appeals court ruled that a secret legal opinion by the Justice Department that allows for the FBI to obtain customers’ records from telecommunications companies without a subpoena or court order can remain secret.
The New York Times‘ Charlie Savage reports that
Mark Rumold, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which had filed a lawsuit asking for the OLC memo to be made public, said that his group was “disappointed by [the] decision, which allows the government to continue to secretly reinterpret federal surveillance laws in ways that diverge significantly from the public’s understanding of these laws.”
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