Justice Department fails in bid to delay landmark case on NSA collection
Source: The Guardian
Justice Department fails in bid to delay landmark case on NSA collection
Ewen MacAskill in New York
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 25 July 2013 21.12 BST
The Obama administration has been rebuffed at the first hearing of a landmark case into the constitutionality of the mass collection of telephone data.
Justice Department lawyers argued for the case to be delayed because the intelligence community is busily working through classified material related to surveillance to see what can be made public. Some of that declassified material could be pertinent to the case, but it is a time-consuming effort, they said.
But at the US district court in New York, judge William Pauley dismissed the request and set a schedule, with motions to be filed by 26 August and oral arguments to begin on 1 November.
The 40-minute hearing in courtroom 20B could be the start of a long process that could go all the way to the supreme court unless the NSA abandons major parts of its surveillance programme or Congress changes the law.
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Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/25/justice-department-case-nsa-collection
