US court rules NSA phone surveillance illegal

The National Security Agency programme that collects information on the phone calls of tens of millions of Americans suffered its most significant legal setback when it was ruled illegal by a federal appeals court on Thursday.

The three-judge panel ruled that the programme exposed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden was not permitted by the Patriot Act, the sweeping counterterror bill passed by Congress in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

The ruling comes at a politically sensitive moment for the NSA as Congress is beginning to debate whether to renew the section of the Patriot Act, which had been used to justify the bulk collection programme.

Although intelligence officials have said the data are critical for counter-terrorism missions, there is a strong push in Congress to either abolish the programme or place substantial limits on it.

The judges from the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit did not address the issue of whether the data collection programme violated the constitution and its prohibition against "unreasonable seizures and searches".

However, in a 97-page ruling, they said that the section of the Patriot Act, which allows law enforcement to collect business records that are considered relevant to counterterror investigations, could not be used to allow such broad sweeps of call data.

"The statutes to which the government points have never been interpreted to authorise anything approaching the breadth of the sweeping surveillance at issue here," wrote Judge Gerard Lynch wrote for the panel. "The sheer volume of information sought is staggering."

The ruling added: "Such expansive development of government repositories of formerly private records would be an unprecedented contraction of the privacy expectations of all Americans."

The revelation about the call data collection programme was the first - and in the US, the most politically explosive - of the disclosures by Mr Snowden in 2013. Previously, senior US officials had publicly denied that there was any mass collection of US call data.

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Congress has until the end of June to renew the section of the Patriot Act that has been used to support the bulk collection programme. The judges said that if Congress wanted "to authorise such a far-reaching and unprecedented programme, it has every opportunity to do so, and to do so unambiguously."

A bill that would end the bulk collection programme has strong support in the House but it is being opposed by Mitch McConnell, the majority leader in the Senate. The Republican senator has called for a "clean" bill to reauthorise the parts of the act that expire.

The issue could become a feature of the rapidly building campaign for the Republican presidential nomination with Senator Rand Paul a vocal opponent of the NSA.

Attorney-general Loretta Lynch said she is reviewing the ruling. But given the June expiration date of the surveillance programme, the Justice Department is looking for ways to reauthorise the programme to maintain the efficacy of it but also uphold privacy standards.

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