National Security Agency installation in Fort Meade, Maryland January 25, 2006.
Photo: Brooks Kraft/ Corbis
Just eleven days after a federal judge in D.C. ruled that the NSA’s metadata collection program was more unconstitutional than a 34-year-old president, a different federal judge, this time in New York, found the same program to be perfectly constitutional. “The collection of breathtaking amounts of information unprotected by the Fourth Amendment does not transform that sweep into a Fourth Amendment search,” Judge William Pauley of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York wrote. Again, this is all just foreplay for the Supreme Court.
