The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on Thursday revived a challenge to the NSA’s phone metadata bulk collection program. The court said the surveillance program “exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized.” The appeals court, which vacated the dismissal of a suit in the Southern District of New York, did not rule on the constitutionality of the program. A similar challenge is pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

“Such expansive development of government repositories of formerly private records would be an unprecedented contraction of the privacy expectations of all Americans,” Judge Gerard Lynch wrote for the three-judge panel. “Perhaps such a contraction is required by national security needs in the face of the dangers of contemporary domestic and international terrorism. But we would expect such a momentous decision to be preceded by substantial debate, and expressed in unmistakable language. There is no evidence of such a debate in the legislative history of § 215, and the language of the statute, on its face, is not naturally read as permitting investigative agencies, on the approval of the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court], to do any more than obtain the sorts of information routinely acquired in the course of criminal investigations of ‘money laundering [and] drug dealing.’”

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