RIGHT SPEAK: Federal Appeals Court Rules: NSA Phone Program Is Illegal

A federal appeals court ruled Thursday the National Security Agency’s controversial collection of millions of Americans’ phone records isn’t authorized by the Patriot Act, as the Bush and Obama administrations have long maintained.

The ruling greatly increases the pressure on Congress to make significant changes—or end outright—the surveillance program. The judges not only ruled against the phone program, but sharply criticized many of the legal theories upon which the U.S. government has built out its surveillance capabilities since the 2001 terror attacks.

The NSA has used the Patriot Act to justify collecting records of nearly every call made in the U.S. and entering them into a database to search for possible contacts among terrorism suspects. The program gathers metadata—the records of which numbers are called, the time, and the duration of those calls—but not the contents of the conversations.

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The scope of the program was revealed in 2013 when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents describing the program, triggering a national debate over the extent of the data collection and whether it infringes on Americans’ privacy.

The ruling by the three-judge panel in New York comes at a delicate point in the national debate over government surveillance, as Section 215 of the Patriot Act is due to expire on June 1 and lawmakers are haggling about whether to renew it, modify it, or let it lapse. The court’s 97-page decision is the most significant legal ruling on the program.