Washington (CNN)A
federal appeals court ruled Thursday that the National Security
Agency's controversial collection of Americans' phone records, the
subject of documents leaked by Edward Snowden, is not legal under the
Patriot Act.
The Second Circuit
Court of Appeals held in the case, which was brought by the ACLU, that
the telephone metadata collection program "exceeds the scope of what
Congress has authorized." The court did not rule on a larger
Constitutional issue and sent the case back down to a lower court for
further proceedings.
The program
gathers up bulk telephone records to enable targeted searches based on
telephone numbers or other identifiers associated with terrorist
organizations.
A three-judge panel held that the text of
the Patriot Act "cannot bear the weight the government asks us to
assign to it and that it does not authorize the telephone metadata
program."
"If Congress chooses to
authorize such a far-reaching and unprecedented program, it has every
opportunity to do so, unambiguously," the court said. "Until such times
as it does so, however, we decline to deviate from widely accepted
interpretations of well-established legal standards. "
Continue Reading at ..... http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/07/politics/nsa-telephone-metadata-illegal-court/index.html
