A federal judge threw a wrench into the NSA's system of domestic spying by ordering the agency to cease all data collection on a particular attorney in California. The decision will likely mean the program will come to an early end.
On Monday a federal judge threw a roadblock in front of the National Security Agency with a ruling that may force the premature shutdown of the NSA’s phone data collection program that has been ongoing since the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. The program was originally ordered to be shut down in a few weeks.
A federal appeals court in New York City had, on Oct. 30, ordered the NSA to shut down its program of collecting phone records data on Americans without anyone’s approval but their own. The court gave the NSA until the end of November to shut the program down and shift over a new system, according to The New York Times.
On Monday, however, federal judge Richard Leon of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia ordered that the NSA must stop collecting information about a certain attorney who is based in California. Leon wrote a 43-page decision stating, in part, that the constitutional issues that the New York Court, and Congress, refused to address must be addressed and addressed soon.
While the judge declared that the NSA program of spying on American’s phone calls is likely un-constitutional, he stopped short of outright declaring it to be so. Instead, he wrote that it will be an ongoing debate and battle between privacy rights and what the governments mandates to be “national security.” The NSA, and the federal government, has always maintained that the program was designed to uncover terrorists lurking in America.
The NSA’s domestic spying program was brought out to the public by security contractor Edward Snowden in 2013. Since then, Snowden has been in hiding, as the American government has declared him a traitor and wants his return to stand trial for treason. Judge Leon recalled that the he had heard the Justice Department say that to block just one person’s name from the NSA’s collection database would likely mean shutting the entire system down, as it would not be able to isolate just one specific person. Hence, he ordered the NSA to stop tracking the California lawyer.
The NSA and the Justice Department had no immediate comments with regard to Judge Leon’s decision.
