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A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that the US National Security Agency's bulk collection of citizens' phone records was against the law. The program, now ended, collected records from phone carriers about who called whom. The massive collection went beyond the scope of what Congress allowed under a foundational surveillance law, the panel of judges ruled, adding that the program may have violated the US Constitution.

The collection program was first revealed to the public in 2013 by journalists who received a document leak from Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor. Snowden also revealed several other programs in which the NSA and agencies in cooperating countries tapped into the backbone of the internet in the name of foreign surveillance. The NSA news outraged privacy advocates and US citizens whose data was caught up in the dragnet. It also prompted US tech companies to distance themselves from government spy agencies in an effort to reassure customers that their data was secure.
"I never imagined that I would live to see our courts condemn the NSA's activities as unlawful and in the same ruling credit me for exposing them," Snowden tweeted on Wednesday. "And yet that day has arrived."

Congress ended the bulk collection program in 2015 with the approval of the USA Freedom Act, requiring the NSA to stop the collection later that year.
Nonetheless, ACLU senior staff attorney Patrick Toomey called Wednesday's ruling a victory for privacy rights. "The decision also recognizes that when the government seeks to prosecute a person, it must give notice of the secret surveillance it used to gather its evidence," Toomey said. "This protection is a vital one given the proliferation of novel spying tools the government uses today."
The court's ruling, written by Judge Marsha Berzon, held that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, didn't permit bulk collection of phone users' call records, as some had claimed. "The metadata collection exceeded the scope of Congress's authorization," she wrote.

The NSA declined to comment.