This week's NSA ruling by a federal court means the security agency can resume its surveillance program over Americans' phone records for five months while the program is permanently phased out.
Though the USA Freedom Act ended the bulk collection of information, federal Judge Michael W. Mosman ruled Monday that the lag time inserted into the plan allows for continued
collection until it takes full effect, The Hill reported.
"This application presents the question whether the recently-enacted USA Freedom Act, in amending Title V of FISA, ended the bulk collection of telephone metadata. The short answer is yes,"
Mosman wrote in his opinion.
"But in doing so, Congress deliberately carved out a 180-day period following the date of enactment in which such collection was specifically authorized," the opinion continued.
The New York Times reported that the Obama administration applied to restart the bulk collection during the transition period after the president signed the Freedom Act on June 2. Advocacy group FreedomWorks, though, filed its own motion charging that the NSA had no authority to permit the program to resume in the interim.
American Civil Liberties Union attorney Jameel Jaffer told The Times on Tuesday that his group will now take its shot in front of the surveillance court at getting the bulk collection program stopped.
"Neither the statute nor the Constitution permits the government to subject millions of innocent people to this kind of intrusive surveillance," Jaffer said. "We intend to ask the court to prohibit the surveillance and to order the NSA to purge the records it’s already collected."
The U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the bulk collection program was illegal, stating that it went beyond Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act by collecting "staggering" volumes in records that might be used for terrorist links at some
point in the future, The Washington Post reported.
Mosman, though, wrote that he disagreed with the appeals court, saying, "This description bears little resemblance to how the government actually uses the records," The Post noted.
The bulk phone records program began in 2001 when the Bush administration secretly authorized the NSA to collect domestic phone collect records in bulk as part of other post-Sept. 11 counterterrorism efforts, according to The Times.
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