US Judge Rules Against NSA In Phone Spying Case (reuters.com)

An anonymous reader writes with news that a federal judge ordered the NSA to immediately end its collection of call records associated with a California lawyer and his law firm. Reuters reports: "Opponents of mass surveillance cheered the ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon, who granted an injunction to bar the NSA from collecting the phone metadata of California attorney J.J. Little and his small legal practice. Unlike previous rulings against the NSA's program to vacuum up Americans' call data, which was exposed publicly by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in 2013, Leon's opinion does not grant a stay, meaning it will take effect immediately."

Comments

Do the easy one first ...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Does every American need to file suit to shut it down completely?

Rule of thumb for getting things to happen via the courts:

  1) Find a slam-dunk case to establish a precedent. You're putting the first crack in the wall, establishing that there's something there.

  2) Do (typically a small number of) additional cases to establish the extent of the precedent's application. Now that something is established, the courts switch from stonewall to map-it-out mode.

Prosecutors do this sort of stuff all the time. (That's why things like restricting freedom of the press and speech generally starts with going after child molesters and child pornography purveyors.)

But it works both ways. Here we have a case where government investigative agencies are going after the communications between lawyers and clients. That's a fundamental part of the legal system, so the actions of the spooks are likely to be as repellent to the judges at all levels as child molesters are to juries.

If the rulings on this case put the first crack in the wall, it should take no more than a handful more to get solid rules established about what the spooks can't do, and how to figure out when they did it and spank them.

After that, as with other rights, we'll be on the usual treadmill: The bad behavior will be reduced a lot; violations will occur, become more common, and eventually institutionalized - when not caught and fought; and intermittent suits will be needed now and then to trim it back and/or map out additional hands-off boundaries.