As promised, the American Civil Liberties Union appeals a ruling that found the NSA's bulk collection of phone metadata to be legal and a "vital tool."
The American Civil Liberties Union on Thursday filed an appeal in their lawsuit challenging the NSA's bulk collection of phone metadata.
The appeal comes after the case, ACLU vs. James R. Clapper, was dismissed last week by US District Judge William Pauley. In his ruling, Pauley said the US government had a pressing need for the surveillance program as a method for detecting and preventing terrorist attacks and that it did not go to unreasonable lengths in that pursuit.
The ACLU, which vowed last week to press on with the case, argues that the NSA program violates both statutory law and the Constitution.
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"The government has a legitimate interest in tracking the associations of suspected terrorists, but tracking those associations does not require the government to subject every citizen to permanent surveillance," said Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director, in a release. "Further, as the president's own review panel recently observed, there's no evidence that this dragnet program was essential to preventing any terrorist attack. We categorically reject the notion that the threat of terrorism requires citizens of democratic countries to surrender the freedoms that make democracies worth defending."
The ACLU expects the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to set an expedited briefing schedule and hear oral argument in the spring.
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