06.06.2014 - 05:44 [ Techdirt ]

Judge Says Supreme Court Should Overturn Awful Surveillance Precedent, But Until It Does, He Has To Reject Case Against NSA

We‘ve written plenty about the case Smith v. Maryland, which established the dangerous Supreme Court precedent that there is no 4th Amendment expectation of privacy to be found in any data or information you give to a third party. Judge Richard Leon, back in December, ruled that the NSA surveillance efforts were so different from the situation in Smith (involving police getting dialing information on a single person from the phone company) that it wasn‘t an applicable precedent in the case in front of him, brought by Larry Klayman. That case is now being appealed.