A federal judge may have laid the foundation for U.S. Supreme Court review of the National Security Agency's telephone data surveillance program when he said it probably violates constitutional privacy rights.
In a first-of-its-kind ruling, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon said Monday in Washington that technology has outpaced the landmark 34-year-old Supreme Court decision underpinning the legal justification for the spy agency's collection of telephone call data.
Leon said the decades-old decision, which let police track phone calls in the pre-wireless era, can't be used as a precedent to determine the constitutional reach of surveillance in the digital age.