Jacob Sullum on the Ruling Against the NSA’s Phone Record Dragnet

When he issued a preliminary injunction
against the NSA’s phone record database on Monday, U.S. District
Judge Richard Leon declared, “I cannot imagine a more
‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary invasion’ than this systematic and
high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually
every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it
without prior judicial approval. Surely, such a program infringes
on ‘that degree of privacy’ that the Founders enshrined in the
Fourth Amendment.” Surely it does, says Senior Editor Jacob Sullum,
but it is hard to see how the Supreme Court can reach that
conclusion without reconsidering the “third party doctrine,” which
holds that information loses Fourth Amendment protection when you
disclose it to someone else.

View this article.