Second Circuit Hears Arguments on Phone Surveillance

The federal government was before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit yesterday to defend the National Security Agency's collection of phone call metadata for millions of Americans in order to investigate foreign terrorism, the New York Law Journal's Mark Hamblett reports: [Assistant U.S. Attorney General Stuart] Delery said the case was governed by Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979), where the U.S. Supreme Court held that telephone users lack a Fourth Amendment privacy interest in the telephone numbers they dialed because they voluntarily give that information to their telephone company. [Alex] Abdo [of the American Civil Liberties Union] countered that the use of a pen register against a criminal suspect in the Smith case was a far cry from the mass accumulation of phone data on the chance it may be useful to derail a terror attack." U.S. District Judge William Pauley refused to grant an injunction against the surveillance, but two other district judges came to the opposite conclusion.