Appeals court backs NSA phone-snooping, overturns Klayman victory

[Geee]

Washingrton Times:

A federal appeals court backed the NSA’s phone-snooping program Friday in a short but complicated decision that said Larry Klayman, the plaintiff and frequent court adversary to President Obama, never proved that his calls were scooped up in the phone-records dragnet.

 

The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said Mr. Klayman was using “conjecture” when he said the metadata from his calls were being collected, since the government has never actually admitted to how broadly its searches go. Without being able to prove his records were involved, Mr. Klayman wasn’t able to make his case, the judges concluded.

 

Plaintiffs complain that the government should not be allowed to avoid liability simply by keeping the material classified. But the government’s silence regarding the scope of bulk collection is a feature of the program, not a bug,” Judge Stephen F. Williams wrote.

 

The ruling reverses a lower court decision by Judge Richard J. Leon, who’d issued an injunction finding the bulk-data collection program likely unconstitutional, and ordered that Mr. Klayman’s data not be stored.

 

[Valin]

Good.