A federal court has ruled that the National Security Agency’s metadata surveillance program, which collected information on at least 80 percent of all the phone calls made or received by Americans, was not authorized by the PATRIOT Act and therefore illegal.
A unanimous opinion issued by the three judges of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, based in New York, said that while section 215 of the PATRIOT Act authorized the agency to gather data on information relevant to the investigation of potential terrorist threats, that power did not extend to the wholesale “bulk collection” of metadata.
“The records demanded are not those of suspects under investigation, or of people or businesses that have contact with such subjects,” the decision reads. “They extend to every record that exists, and indeed to records that do not yet exist.”
