WND EXCLUSIVE

JUDGE FLIPS SWITCH ON 'ORWELLIAN' SPYING OF AMERICANS

Case called 'pinnacle of national importance'

Bob Unruh

A judge has scheduled a hearing for Wednesday in a lawsuit against the National Security Agency’s spy-on-Americans program, which he previously described as “almost Orwellian.”

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon nearly two years ago found that the program likely violates the U.S. Constitution and ordered it to stop. He then put a hold on his ruling to allow the government to appeal.

Now that the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals has disagreed with Leon’s findings and returned the case to him, he will make a ruling on access to evidence in the case.

A large part of the case is over the NSA program’s secrecy. The appeals court said the plaintiffs couldn’t specifically prove their own telephone records were seized by the government, so they couldn’t sue.

But they cannot obtain access to such evidence without a case pending.

The appeals court said the case needed to be returned to Leon, ordering him to review whether “limited discovery” is available to the plaintiffs.

Their attorney, Larry Klayman of Freedom Watch, who was joined by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for National Security Studies in his arguments, seeks to stop the NSA’s mass collection of telephone data.

The plaintiffs contended that such a bulk collection of data constitutes “an unlawful search under the Fourth Amendment.”

Support attorney Larry Klayman as he mobilizes millions of freedom-loving Americans from all over the country to stop President Obama’s spying on U.S. citizens and to preserve our freedoms!

Klayman said the case was the result of whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations about the government’s secret spying on Americans.

After the ruling came down from the D.C. Circuit, Judge Leon immediately set a hearing for Wednesday, even rejecting an Obama Justice Department request for another delay.

“It is thus clear that the court intends to move this case along to get to the bottom of the unconstitutional surveillance, and to move it to trial as soon as possible,” Klayman said in a statement.

“We are pleased that Judge Leon is moving quickly to address the continued Orwellian illegal surveillance of all Americans, not just my clients and me. Previously the judge called our case the ‘pinnacle of national importance,’ and I could not agree with him more. Judge Leon is a courageous judge and we are hopeful that he will now implement a procedure to allow us to quickly seek and obtain justice,” Klayman said.

In a recent commentary for WND, Klayman explained that the appellate judges, David Sentelle, Janice Rogers Brown and Steven Williams, are allowing Leon to review whether discovery supports the idea “the NSA had actually accessed Verizon cell phone telephonic records and whether we had sued the correct Verizon company.”

He quoted from the earlier ruling from Leon, who said, “The NSA has collected and analyzed [plaintiffs'] telephony metadata and will continue to operate the program consistent with FISC opinions and orders.”

Klayman accused the appeals court of acting politically, rather than judicially, and explained the NSA “was forced to reveal … that the intelligence agencies routinely use their spy programs to spy on innocent Americans and presumable coerce them into doing what the government wants.”

Klayman told WND he’s confident of prevailing “ultimately.”

“In terms of discovery, I should be able to find out whether we were surveilled or not,” he told WND. “We’re going to win in the end.”

No matter what else results, he said, people are now engaged in the issue and watching the judges for their opinions.

WND recently reported that because of the nearly two-year delay in the decision by the appeals court, Klayman had asked Leon to go ahead and impose his injunction.

At the time, Klayman, in a renewed request for Leon to lift the stay, charged the Obama Justice Department, infected by “delay tactics,” was influencing the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which, after 19 months “still has not ruled on the government defendants’ appeal.”

In 2013, Leon found the NSA program appears to run afoul of the Fourth Amendment, and the Justice Department failed to show that collecting the metadata on telephone calls helped to stop terrorist attacks.

Snowden blew the whistle on the agency’s vacuum-cleaner approach to data collection, called “bulk telephony metadata.” That was earlier in 2013, and Snowden has been living in exile in Russia as a wanted man by the U.S. government ever since.

Two of America’s influential civil-rights groups, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, have sided with Klayman.

The data that the NSA collects, they explained in a brief, “reveals political affiliation, religious practices and peoples’ most intimate associations.”

“It reveals who calls a suicide prevention line and who calls their elected official; who calls the local tea-party office and who calls Planned Parenthood.”

The brief said “the relevant fact for whether an expectation of privacy exists is that the comprehensive telephone records the government collects – not just the records of a few calls over a few days but all of a person’s calls over many years – reveals highly personal information about the person and her life.”

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2015/09/judge-flips-switch-on-orwellian-spying-of-americans/#Cr1uIUvbGdLphlLD.99