Your Right to Know

WASHINGTON — A secretive U.S. spy court has ruled again that the National Security Agency can
keep collecting every American’s telephone records every day, in the midst of dueling decisions in
two civilian federal courts about whether the surveillance program is constitutional.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court renewed the NSA phone-collection program yesterday,
said Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Such
periodic requests are somewhat formulaic but required since the program started in 2006.

The latest approval was the first since two conflicting court decisions about whether the
program is lawful and since a presidential advisory panel recommended that the NSA no longer be
allowed to collect and store the phone records and search them without obtaining separate court
approval for each search.

In a statement, Turner said that 15 judges on the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
on 36 occasions over the past seven years have approved the NSA’s collection of U.S. phone records
as lawful.

Also yesterday, government lawyers turned to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of
Columbia Circuit to block a federal judge’s decision that threatens the NSA phone-records
program.

The Justice Department filed a notice asking the appeals court to overturn U.S. District Judge
Richard Leon’s ruling last month that the program was likely unconstitutional. The government’s
move had been expected.

Larry Klayman, who filed the class-action suit against President Barack Obama and top
administration national-security officials, said he intends to petition the federal appeals court
next week to send the case to the Supreme Court.

Turner said U.S. intelligence agencies would be willing to modify the phone-records surveillance
program to provide additional privacy and civil-liberties protections as long as it was still
operationally beneficial. He said the Obama administration was carefully evaluating the advisory
panel’s recent recommendations.

In a separate case involving the program, a district judge in New York last month upheld the
data collection as lawful.