 WASHINGTON—A federal judge ruled Monday that the National Security Agency's collection of phone records "almost certainly" violates the Constitution, setting up a larger legal battle over long-secret counterterrorism programs. Describing the government's surveillance efforts as "almost-Orwellian," U.S. District Judge Richard Leon found the challengers in a lawsuit in Washington were likely to succeed on their Fourth Amendment privacy claims. Although Leon granted the injunction, he stayed that order pending the government's appeal "in light of the significant national security interests at stake in this case and the novelty of the constitutional issues." Leon’s 68-page opinion is the first significant legal setback for the NSA’s surveillance program since it was disclosed in June in news stories based on leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court reviews warrants for government surveillance, but Leon said that didn't stop him from having jurisdiction to hear constitutional claims related to that surveillance. “When do present-day circumstances—the evolution of the government’s surveillance capabilities, citizens’ phone habits, and the relationship between the NSA and telecom companies—become so thoroughly unlike those considered by the Supreme Court thirty-four years ago that a precedent like Smith does not apply?” Leon wrote. “The answer, unfortunately for the government, is now.” 
 
 The judge said he was “convinced that the surveillance program now before me is so different from a simple pen register that Smith is of little value in assessing whether the Bulk Telephony Metadata Program constitutes a Fourth Amendment search.” 
 
 “To the contrary,” Leon wrote, “I believe that the bulk telephony metadata collection and analysis almost certainly does violate a reasonable expectation of privacy.” 
 
 Leon said “the almost-Orwellian technology that enables the government to store and analyze the phone metadata of every telephone user in the United States is unlike anything that could have been conceived in 1979.” 
 
 The judge added that the amount of information contained in phone records today was greater as well. “I have significant doubts about the efficacy of the metadata collection program as a means of conducting time-sensitive investigations in cases involving imminent threats of terrorism,” Leon wrote. A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Justice, Andrew Ames, said the government is reviewing the court's decision. Indeed, I have little doubt that the author of our Constitution, James Madison, who cautioned us to beware ‘the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power’ would be aghast,” the judge wrote.
– The NSA's massive collection of phone metadata is "almost certainly" unconstitutional, a federal judge declared in a blistering statement today. Judge Richard Leon issued an injunction banning the agency from spying on the plaintiffs in the lawsuit he was reviewing—legal analyst Larry Klayman and one of his clients—though he suspended that injunction to allow the government to appeal, Politico and the Wall Street Journal report. Leon called the program "almost Orwellian," writing, "I cannot imagine a more 'indiscriminate' and 'arbitrary invasion'" of privacy. "I have little doubt that the author of our Constitution, James Madison, who cautioned us to beware 'the abridgment of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power,' would be aghast," he added, according to the Blog of the Legal Times.