An NSA program collecting vast troves of cell-phone metadata violates the Fourth Amendment, a U.S. District Court judge ruled today in a major legal decision that doesn’t really matter all that much because it will be appealed countless times. But here’s what Judge Richard “The Professional” Leon had to say about the program:
>“I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary invasion’ than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying it and analyzing it without judicial approval,” wrote Leon, an appointee of President George W. Bush.
Leon claims that not only is the NSA violating the constitution, it is also doing so for basically no reason:
“The government does not cite a single instance in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the Government in achieving any objective that was time-sensitive in nature.”
