NSA Phone Plan May Reach Supreme Court on 1979 Precedent

[Purveyor]

By Andrew Zajac and Greg Stohr - Dec 18, 2013

A federal judge may have laid the foundation for U.S. Supreme Court review of the National Security Agency’s telephone data surveillance program when he said it probably violates constitutional privacy rights.

In a first-of-its-kind ruling, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington said Dec. 16 that technology has outpaced the landmark 34-year-old Supreme Court decision underpinning the legal justification for the spy agency’s collection of telephone call data.

Leon said the decades-old decision, which let police track phone calls in the pre-wireless era, can’t be used as a precedent to determine the constitutional reach of surveillance in the digital age.

“It’s likely that this case will end up in the Supreme Court,” said Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington and a critic of the NSA program. “The government wouldn’t let stand an opinion that would prevent it from engaging in the collection of telephone records as it’s been doing.”

In the high court’s 1979 Smith v. Maryland ruling, the justices said Americans don’t have a Fourth Amendment privacy right to the phone numbers they call.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-18/nsa-phone-plan-could-land-in-supreme-court-over-1979-precedent.html

[sabrina 1]

1. If that is the case then why do they need a warrant? They might not want to do that considering

what is being revealed regarding what they are doing with the data they are collecting. Stunning deception and lies as to their reasons for what they are doing. THAT is what needs to be dealt with first.

Americans don't seem to have too many rights anyhow, what's one more these days?