Appeals Court Overturns Ruling Against NSA Bulk Collection Program

The U.S. Court of Appeals ruled today that the NSA’s bulk phone data collection program can continue until November of this year. As most of you will remember, the program will be shut down after that because Congress changed the law back in June.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that +public-interest lawyer Larry Klayman, the founder of Freedom Watch, has not proved that his own phone records were collected by the NSA — and so has not met a condition of bringing the lawsuit. It sent the case back to a lower court for further deliberation on the issue. The panel’s ruling also reversed a ban on the NSA’s collection that had been imposed — and temporarily stayed — by a district court judge in December 2013.

Why even bother with this ruling when Congress has already shut the program down?

Overturned on a technicality...back to business.

The program isn't shut down, nor is it to be shut down. What is being changed is that the service providers will no longer dump everything directly to the NSA's holding database. Instead the providers hold the data and the NSA queries their databases instead.