Judge: NSA phone surveillance is legal, and a 'vital tool'

A federal judge ruled on Friday that the National Security Agency's bulk collection of millions of Americans' telephone and Internet records is legal and important part of the country's effort to combat the threat of terrorism.

The judgement, in a case brought before a district court in New York by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), directly contradicts the result of a similar challenge in a Washington court last week which ruled the NSA's bulk collection program was likely to prove unconstitutional and was "almost Orwellian" in scale.

In his ruling on Friday, US District Judge William Pauley said that the US government had a pressing need for the surveillance program as a method for detecting and preventing terrorist attacks and that it did not go to unreasonable lengths in that pursuit.

"We are extremely disappointed with this decision, which misinterprets the relevant statutes, understates the privacy implications of the government's surveillance and misapplies a narrow and outdated precedent to read away core constitutional protections," Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director said in a statement.

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