Federal Judge Writes Epic Smackdown of ‘Likely Unconstitutional’ NSA Phone Record Collection Posted on December 16, 2013 by Andrew Findley Forbes; December 16, 2013 Thanks to a leak of classified documents by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, we learned this summer that Verizon (and presumably other phone companies) were regularly handing over to the federal government metadata for all of their customers. Metadata being a fancy word for lists of all the phone calls made, which numbers were calling which numbers and how long those conversations lasted. While jaws were still on the floor regarding the scope of such collection, which would include hundreds of millions of people (including you, unless you don’t have a phone), two Verizon subscribers got to work drafting up a lawsuit. Larry Klayman, a conservative activist, and Charles Strange, father of a Navy SEAL who died in Afghanistan, sued the federal government as well as Verizon, saying that the phone company handing over their information to the feds was a violation of the U.S. Constitution and an “outrageous” breach of privacy. In a scathing opinion out of the D.C. Circuit Monday, federal judge Richard Leon agreed with them, saying the phone metadata collection program is “almost certainly” unconstitutional. To read the complete article, please click here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/12/16/federal-judge-writes-epic-smackdown-of-unconstitutional-nsa-phone-record-collection/’
