FISA Court rules that 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals was wrong, NSA can temporarily resume bulk data collection for the next five months
for a while Zack Whittaker / Yahoo Tech : NSA Can Resume Bulk Collection of Americans' Phone Records, Says Court
Context & Ripple Effects
Two months ago the legal ground shifted under the NSA's phone-records program: the [[a:828974|2nd Circuit ruled that bulk telephone-metadata collection was never authorized by the Patriot Act]], and reporting followed that bulk collection would wind down even though the USA Freedom Act failed in the Senate. Today's FISA Court order reverses that trajectory, granting the agency a five-month bridge to keep the program running.
The order matters because no single court currently speaks for the program's legality — the same spring produced both the 2nd Circuit's prohibition and the FISA Court's green light, leaving the NSA operating under whichever ruling is newest and setting up a contest between appellate courts.
First-order effects
- The NSA can restart collecting Americans' telephone metadata immediately under fresh FISA Court authorization, overriding the shutdown path created by the 2nd Circuit's May prohibition.
- Congress inherits a hard deadline: the authorization lapses in five months, forcing a legislative decision on the program's future after the USA Freedom Act failed to settle it.
Second-order effects
- The ruling invites counter-moves elsewhere in the judiciary — the DC Circuit subsequently throws out the ruling that would have blocked collection, leaving legal authority over the program contested between circuits.
- Renewed scrutiny shifts back to Capitol Hill, where the five-month expiry makes reauthorization or restructuring the deciding battleground rather than any individual court.
Third-order effects
- If the court-versus-court pattern holds, program legality stays provisional until an authoritative verdict — which arrives in 2020, when a federal appeals court rules the mass surveillance program possibly unconstitutional and its bulk metadata collection illegal.
- Each extension compounds the oversight ledger: by 2023 a court finds the FBI misused a FISA Section 702 database more than 278,000 times even as national security agencies lobby Congress to reauthorize the law, hardening the case against broad surveillance authority.
The trend: US bulk-surveillance legality is being decided through a rolling sequence of court rulings and temporary authorizations, with each five-month-style bridge deferring the final settlement to Congress or a higher court.