Loading ...Federal Appeals Court Rules Mass NSA Spying On US Citizens Not Authorized By Patriot Act
Tyler Durden’s pictureSubmitted by Tyler Durden on 05/07/2015 09:57 -0400
While Edward Snowden may be legally charged for treason in the US (even as he gets his own statue in Berlin), his contributions to US civil rights just got a huge validation by none other than the Federal appeals court which ruled moments ago that the National Security Agency’s controversial collection of millions of Americans’ phone records isn’t authorized by the Patriot Act, as the Bush and Obama administrations have long maintained.
It would appear America’s transformation into a “Big Brother” police state is not endorsed by every branch of the government after all.
As the WSJ reports, the ruling by the three-judge panel in New York “comes at a delicate point in the national debate over government surveillance, as Section 215 of the Patriot Act is due to expire next month and lawmakers are haggling about whether to renew it, modify it, or let it die.”
The court’s ruling came in a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union arguing the data collection should be stopped because it violates Americans’ privacy rights. A lower court judge ruled the program was constitutional, and the civil liberties group appealed, leading to Thursday’s decision.
“The text of (Section 215) cannot bear the weight the government asks us to assign to it, and…does not authorize the telephone metadata program,’’ the court wrote.