A high court denounced NSA snooping on Americans' phone calls as illegal today, overturning a lower court’s decision approving of bulk data collection, and calling the practice instead an unbearable “weight.”
Though the surprise ruling will likely produce shrugs of indifference from Obama and his cabal, it’s noteworthy as the first time that particular branch of the judiciary has refused to sanction the wide-sweeping unconstitutional intrusion of privacy.
It also comes at a bad time for congressional leaders who have to decide soon whether they’ll renew the portion of the unpatriotic Patriot Act which supposedly authorizes the government to eavesdrop without cause.
The provision that the NSA and FBI have been relying upon to justify randomly mining millions of innocent citizens' phone data is set to automatically expire next month, and therefore has become a bone of contention.
But today’s 97-page decision from the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit might ultimately render that lofty debate, together with the overreaching statute itself, null and void.
The legal challenge against it was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and is one of many lawsuits filed in the wake of intelligence leaks by Edward Snowden.
It’s treason and an impeachable offense for any person who has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution to intentionally subvert it.
