From HSToday:
On May 7, in ACLU v. Clapper, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals held that the controversial National Security Agency (NSA) telephone metadata collection program—involving the court-ordered collection of vast amounts of telephone bill information for subsequent computer searches to identify phone numbers that communicate with phones associated with foreign terrorists—was not authorized by Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, the legal authority upon which it was said to be based. Many who learned of the court’s decision quite reasonably assumed that meant the metadata collection program was illegal. But it is important to understand that there are important constitutional issues that were not raised in this case and are largely being ignored in the current public debate.
