A U.S. appeals court on Friday overturned a ruling that the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone records was illegal, saying the plaintiffs failed to show they were victims.
The court’s decision on the NSA’s collection of phone metadata was consistent with the Obama administration’s stance that the intelligence gathering programmes are constitutional, the White House said on Friday.
The federal court threw out a judge’s ruling that would have blocked the NSA’s metadata collection. A lower court, in a preliminary 2013 ruling, said the programme was probably unconstitutional and “almost Orwellian.”
But the appellate panel said the case should not proceed because the plaintiffs failed to show they had been targeted for surveillance as part of the programme.
