A federal appeals panel of three judges in New York City heard arguments surrounding the National Security Agency's massive collection of Americans' phone metadata. The hearing lasted two hours, with the American Civil Liberties Union sparring with the Department of Justice about the NSA's right to mass surveillance as detailed by documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden last summer.
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Judge Gerard E. Lynch questioned why the NSA selectively used Section 215 of the Patriot Act to collect phone metadata, but not in other instances.
"You can collect everything there is to know about everybody and have it all in one big government cloud," Lynch said to the government's lawyer, Assistant Attorney General Stuart Delery. "I just don't understand the argument as to what's so special about telephone records that makes them so valuable, so uniquely interactive, that the same arguments you're making don't apply to every record in the hands of a third-party business entity of every American's everything."
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The first day of arguments had the government on the defensive.
"The legal theories that [the NSA] advances are a road map to a world in which the government routinely collects vast quantities of information on Americans who have done absolutely nothing wrong," ACLU attorney Alex Abdo told the court.
The hearing this month originally stems from a lawsuit filed by the ACLU last year soon after the Snowden revelations became public knowledge.
