11/22/2017

CYBERWAR/LEGAL/NSA: “A federal judge threw out two long-running lawsuits challenging the National Security Agency’s collection of phone records under a surveillance program that Congress curbed in 2015.
The 2013 lawsuits, filed by conservative legal activist Larry Klayman, alleged the government violated the Constitution when it gathered millions of Americans’ phone records so it could search them for possible ties to terrorists.
The lawsuits followed the leak of documents by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, which led to public concern about privacy rights. After a judge ruled that Mr. Klayman and his clients were likely to show their rights had been violated, the Obama administration and Congress rewrote national-security laws to prohibit bulk collection of phone records.
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, who had ordered the government to halt the program in a blockbuster 2013 ruling, said on Tuesday [[11-21[17] that the cases had run their course…
Mr. Klayman and his clients sought an order barring future collection of the plaintiffs’ call records and a purge of any stored records, as well as more than $12 million in damages and legal costs.”

-Joe Palazzolo, “Federal Judge Throws Out Lawsuits Over NSA’s Bulk Collection,” The Wall Street Journal online, Nov. 22, 2017 01:23pm