Political Quotes

“It did. On May 7, 2015, a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit unanimously concluded that the NSA's bulk collection program is illegal. The court held that section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act does not authorize bulk collection of Americans' private records and roundly rejected the argument that all of our phone records can be ``relevant'' to any particular authorized investigation. In ACLU v. Clapper, the Second Circuit provided a detailed statutory and legal analysis of section 215 and the bulk collection program. It stated that the government's ``expansive'' interpretation of ``relevance'' in the context of Section 215 ``is unprecedented and unwarranted.'' The court further stated: The interpretation that the government asks us to adopt defies any limiting principle. The same rationale that it proffers for the ``relevance'' of telephone metadata cannot be cabined to such data, and applies equally well to other sets of records. If the government is correct, it could use Sec. 215 to collect and store in bulk any other existing metadata available anywhere in the private sector, including metadata associated with financial records, medical records, and electronic communications (including e- mail and social media information) relating to all Americans. Such expansive development of government repositories of formerly private records would be an unprecedented contraction of the privacy expectations of all Americans.…”