The National Security Agency's (NSA) surveillance program and the question of whether it violates the U.S. Constitution was in the works long before NSA contractor Edward Snowden's revelations, and it has prompted an international discussion about surveillance and security rights.

A secret ruling by a U.S. district court judge recently released by the Obama administration reveals that the NSA violated the Constitution for three years by collecting tens of thousands of purely domestic communications without sufficient privacy protection, according to The Wall Street Journal.

In the strongly worded October 2011 ruling, Judge John Bates wrote: “For the first time, the government has now advised the court that the volume and nature of the information it has been collecting is fundamentally different from what the court had been led to believe.''