(Newswire.net — May 7, 2015) — Washington, DC., – The US Court of Appeals ruled on Thursday that NSA should not use the Patriot Act as a ‘shield’ legalizing the act of collecting metadata and phone tapping.
The Court states that the collection of telephone metadata by US intelligence services “exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized.”
“Such expansive development of government repositories of formerly private records would be an unprecedented contraction of the privacy expectations of all Americans,” Judge Gerard Lynch stated out the majority opinion.
“Perhaps such a contraction is required by national security needs in the face of the dangers of contemporary domestic and international terrorism,” he wrote, adding that there was no debate over this as one might expect.
“There is no evidence of such a debate in the legislative history of § 215, and the language of the statute, on its face, is not naturally read as permitting investigative agencies, on the approval of the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court], to do any more than obtain the sorts of information routinely acquired in the course of criminal investigations of ‘money laundering [and] drug dealing,” Judge Gerard wrote.
The Federal appeals court’s ruling comes as a major blow to the National Security Agency because this means that anyone with evidence that the NSA tapped his or her phone could potentially sue the agency.
The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit said the American Civil Liberties Union can sue the director of national intelligence over the NSA’s bulk collection program, reversing a ruling handed down more than a year earlier, Russia Today reported.
Reportedly, a district court judge had previously dismissed a lawsuit filed by the ACLU days after contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA has regularly collected records of phone calls of millions of Americans, acknowledging NSA’s call on the Patriot Act.
The ACLU appealed and has now been approved by the US Court of Appeals to file a lawsuit against the National Security Agency, ruling that the metadata collection was not authorized, pursuant to Section 215 of the Patriot Act.