National Security Agency

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled Thursday that the National Security Agency's bulk collection of Americans' phone records is illegal, The New York Times' Charlie Savage and Jonathan Weisman reports. The panel ruled that the Patriot Act can't be interpreted to allow the bulk collection of domestic call metadata, but noted that Congress could choose to authorize "'such a far-reaching and unprecedented program.'" The Patriot Act is set to expire June 1.

The Patriot Act permits the collection of records deemed "'relevant'" to a national security case, but the federal government interpreted this to cover the collection of all phone-call metadata so long as relevant records were reviewed by intelligence analysts, Savage and Weisman note.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White of the Northern District of California has ruled that a group of AT&T customers haven't been able to show they have standing to show that their Fourth Amendment rights were violated by alleged surveillance of all of their Internet communications, The Recorder's Ross Todd reports. Even though a retired AT&T technician Mark Klein reports that the the company's Internet traffic is routed to a secret room controlled by the government, the judge "found that Klein could not establish 'the content, function, or purpose of the secure room at the AT&T site based on his own independent knowledge' and that lawyers challenging the program under the Fourth Amendment hadn't offered enough admissible evidence to support standing."

Cyrus Farivar, writing for Ars Technica, features five cases that the U.S. Supreme Court could grant certiorari in and take on privacy and surveillance issues involving the National Security Agency: Klayman v. Obama, First Unitarian Church v. National Security Agency, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) v. Clapper, United States v. Moalin, and United States v. Muhtorov. Farivar notes the Supreme Court held in United States v. Jones that law enforcement doesn't have the authority to use GPS tracking without a warrant and held in Riley v. California that law enforcement can't search a person's phone without a warrant, reflecting "an awareness that modern tech has changed reasonable privacy."

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.

The Washington Post has another Edward Snowden-related piece: those who are not targeted in surveillance by the National Security Agency far outnumber the foreigners who are legally targeted. Nine of 10 accountholders found in a cache of intercepted conversations were not the intended surveillance targets "but were caught in a net the agency has cast for someone else," the Post reports. The newspaper reviewed 160,000 email and instant-message conversations and 7,900 documents taken from 11,000 online accounts, finding. for example, medical records sent by one relative to another, resumes, and schoolchildren's academic transcripts.

In an interview, Snowden told the Post he did want the full archive released, but he did not think journalists could understand the NSA programs '"without being able to review some of that surveillance, both the justified and unjustified.”'

Another disclosure as a result of the Edward Snowden leaks: the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court signed off on the National Security Agency's interception of information about every foreign government but Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the Washington Post reports. The certfication also "permitted the agency to gather intelligence about entities such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and the International Atomic Energy Agency, among others," the Post reports. The NSA did not necessarily target every country or organization it had legal permission to surveill, the Post adds.

The surveillance could cover reporters or attorney-client communications, The Post also notes.

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that police officers may not search the cellphones of people they arrest without warrants yesterday. As The Washington Post's Craig Timberg writes, even though the National Security Agency is not mentioned in the opinion, the court's ruling could impact the future of government surveillance and the contours of digital-age privacy. Legal scholars noted that the opinion was unanimous and that the language was forceful that "the vast troves of information police can find in modern cellphones are no less worthy of constitutional protection than the private papers that Founding Fathers once kept locked in wooden file cabinets inside their homes," Timberg reports.

A federal judge in Idaho, while upholding the National Security Agency's surveillance program of telephone records because of legal precedent, urged the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that the surveillance is unconstitutional, the Wall Street Journal reported: Judge B. Lynn "Winmill said there is a 'looming gulf'' between a 1979 Supreme Court precedent that allowed the government to gather the phone records of a single suspect, and the NSA program that collects millions of phone records of Americans to build a searchable database, including the time, duration, and numbers dialed. The program doesn't gather the content of calls."

Sprint, the country's third-largest wireless provider, was the only cellphone company to receive "the secret legal basis of a then-classified program that collected Americans’ phone records by the billions for counterterrorism purposes" because it was the only company to demand access to that legal rationale before the program was revealed last year by Edward Snowden's leaks, the Washington Post reports. After receiving the rationale, Sprint continued to turn over phone call records to the NSA, the Post also reports.

President Barack Obama plans to get the National Security Agency out of the business of collecting phone call records in bulk, The New York Times' Charlie Savage reports: "Under the proposal, they said, the N.S.A. would end its systematic collection of data about Americans’ calling habits. The bulk records would stay in the hands of phone companies, which would not be required to retain the data for any longer than they normally would. And the N.S.A. could obtain specific records only with permission from a judge, using a new kind of court order." A House Intelligence Committee would allow the NSA to issue subpoenas for specific phone records without judicial approval, The Times also reports.