WASHINGTON — The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled late Monday that the National Security Agency may temporarily resume its once-secret program that systematically collects records of Americans’ domestic phone calls in bulk.
But the American Civil Liberties Union said Tuesday that it would ask the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which had ruled that the surveillance program was illegal, to issue an injunction to halt the program.
The program lapsed June 1, when a law on which it was based, Section 215 of the Patriot Act, expired. Congress revived that provision June 2 with a bill called the USA Freedom Act, which said the provision could not be used for bulk collection after six months.
The six-month period was intended to give intelligence agencies time to move to a new system in which the phone records — which include information like phone numbers and the duration of calls but not the contents of conversations — would stay in the hands of phone companies. Under those rules, the agency would still be able to gain access to the records to analyze links between callers and suspected terrorists.
But in May, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, in New York, ruled in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU that Section 215 of the USAPATRIOT Act could not legitimately be interpreted as permitting bulk collection at all.
After President Barack Obama signed the Freedom Act on June 2, his administration applied to restart the program for six months. But a conservative and libertarian advocacy group, Freedom-Works, filed a motion in the surveillance court saying it had no legal authority to permit the program to resume, even for the interim period.
In a 26-page opinion made public Tuesday, Judge Michael Mosman of the surveillance court rejected the challenge by FreedomWorks, which was represented by a former Virginia attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, a Republican.
And Mosman said the 2nd Circuit was wrong, too.