U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White of the Northern District of California blocked the federal government from destroying the telephone metadata collected by the National Security Agency, The Recorder's Julia Love reports. The move is just a temporary one until the court decides if the data must be preserved after full briefing and argument.
The emergency motion was brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The Justice Department said it was going to begin clearing records today that were more than five-years-old, The Recorder said.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act previously ruled that governmental lawyers were under no obligation to hold telephone metadata beyond the current five-year limit. The FISA court reasoned: "The government can be sanctioned for destruction of evidence only if it is established that it had an obligation to preserve it at the time it was destroyed, that the records were destroyed 'with a culpable state of mind,' and the destroyed evidence was relevant to the party's claim or defense," according to a report in Computer World.
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