District Court Judge Grants Injunction Against NSA's Data-Collection, Finding Suit Will "Likely" Result In Finding that Program is Unconstitutional"

While he granted the injunction, he himself placed it on hold, awaiting the outcome of an appeal.

A federal judge ruled Monday that the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone records violates the Constitution’s ban on unreasonable searches, but put his decision on hold pending a near-certain government appeal.

U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon granted a preliminary injunction sought by plaintiffs Larry Klayman and Charles Strange, concluding they were likely to prevail in their constitutional challenge. Leon, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, ruled Monday that the two men are likely to be able to show that their privacy interests outweigh the government’s interest in collecting the data. Leon says that means that massive collection program is an unreasonable search under the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment.

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[I]n his a 68-page, heavily footnoted opinion, Leon concluded that the government didn’t cite a single instance in which the program “actually stopped an imminent terrorist attack.”

Some analysis from AllahPundit.

The judge found that a previous 1970s ruling did not control here, because of something I keep talking about: Changes in the power of technology to search and compare bits of data. Fifty years ago the police had a very limited ability to utilize your fingerprints record to harm you. If you became a suspect in a case -- and only in that case -- they could painstakingly compare your fingerprints to those found at a crime scene using slow, precious human labor resources.

There were serious practical limits on what could be done with citizen data held in government files. Yes, the government could use that data to put people in jail, but analysis and comparison was a labor intensive process that at least served as a naturally-existing limiting principle on government intrusion: Sure, the government could search your personally-identifying data to connect you with a crime, but, as a practical matter, it was so time-consuming to do so that they generally would not do so, not unless they had a strong suspicion you were actually a culprit.

They wouldn't just compare every fingerprint on file with every fingerprint found at unsolved crime scenes, after all.

Well, today, they can -- and do -- actually do that. So there is no longer any practical limitation on the government's ability to use your DNA to connect you with unknown DNA found at a crime. They can run everyone's DNA through the database with virtually no effort.

I exaggerate; there is some lab work needed to process the DNA and reduce it to a 13 allele "genetic fingerprint." Nevertheless, this can all be done fairly inexpensively, and running it through the database once reduced to a short code is very nearly cost-free.

But within the next ten years all of this will become entirely cost-free.

This is why I disagreed with the Supreme Court's reliance on an old precedent in claiming that the police can take a DNA sample from every single person arrested. Merely arrested, not convicted. They relied on a precedent established at the dawn of investigatory police science, that every arrestee's fingerprints may be collected and catalogued.

But way 'back then, there were natural limitations on the State's power to make use of such data which simply no longer exist. What would have been considered a silly hypothetical sci-fi objection back then -- "But what stops the state from merely searching these fingerprints against every fingerprint ever lifted at a crime scene?" -- is actual reality now.

We can't just treat precedent from the first half of the previous century as controlling, when obviously the world has changed a great deal since then.

&bodytext=While he granted the injunction, he himself placed it on hold, awaiting the outcome of an appeal. A federal judge ruled Monday that the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone records violates the Constitution’s ban on unreasonable searches, but...&topic=world_news"> posted by Ace at 05:06 PM

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