NSA Phone Surveillance Faces Fresh Court Test

&gt; The U.S. argued the simple act of government computers collecting his or anyone else’s phone records aren’t violations of the Constitution’s ban on unreasonable searches or seizures and, in its appeals-court filings, suggests such issues only come into play when a government employee looks at a specific person’s phone records.<p>Except that a government employee specifically instructed the computers to gather and analyze his records to flag them for storage or not.<p>This is clearly a search performed at the request of a government agent, and should trigger 4th amendment protections.<p>They can&#x27;t take papers out of everyone&#x27;s house just because they use robots to do it: we&#x27;d all recognize that the robots were merely a tool following instructions of a government agent who instigated the seizure.<p>The case is no different because they used a different tool to perform the search and seizure - it was at the request and under the direction of a US government agent.

This is an appeal of Klayman vs. Obama, where Judge Leon ruled last December that &quot;[b]ulk telephony metadata collection and analysis almost certainly does violate a reasonable expectation of privacy,&quot; which, in turn, likely results in a violation of the Fourth Amendment.[1] This is probably the biggest win so far in this round of NSA cases, although EFF and ACLU also have complementary lawsuits in progress. The government&#x27;s arguing that Klayman doesn&#x27;t have standing because (they say) it&#x27;s extremely unlikely his metadata would ever be viewed by a human being, as opposed to just recorded and analyzed.<p>This is by the way the same Larry Klayman who&#x27;s suing the federal government arguing that the current Ebola screening procedures open the door to ISIS suicide terrorists. [2] Strange bedfellows. Indeed.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/12/historic-ruling-federal-judge-declares-nsa-mass-phone-surveillance-likely" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2013&#x2F;12&#x2F;historic-ruling-federa...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/10/14/larry-klayman-is-suing-the-federal-government-because-of-ebola-yes-really/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;the-fix&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;14&#x2F;la...</a>

There is a paywall if you go to the link directly. Try going through <a href="https://news.google.com/news?ncl=dkcZSdqad8lGX_MN3eau-UDuh7yUM&amp;q=nsa+court&amp;lr=English&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=1BNUVNNl1umgBP_bgegH&amp;ved=0CCMQqgIwAA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.google.com&#x2F;news?ncl=dkcZSdqad8lGX_MN3eau-UDuh7y...</a><p>Which worked for me.