The plaintiff in a sweeping challenge to National Security Agency eavesdropping tells
Newsmax TV that his fight resumes Tuesday in a federal courtroom where the Obama administration will again try to defend the agency's bulk collection of Americans' phone records.
Freedom Watch and Judicial Watch founder Larry Klayman told "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner on Monday that he expects to hear "nonsense" from government lawyers at the Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., where Klayman v. Obama has landed after a major setback for the defendant.
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Klayman, a former Justice Department prosecutor, won a
preliminary ruling in December against the NSA's domestic phone data-mining program, which U.S. District Judge Richard Leon said is probably in violation of the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of "unreasonable searches and seizures."
Leon stayed his injunction to allow the government to appeal.
Klayman, who filed his original case just days after leaks of classified NSA materials by contractor Edward Snowden, will have lawyers from the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on his team for Tuesday's arguments.
Klayman said his position is that the indiscriminate scooping-up of U.S. telephone "metadata" — numbers dialed, and time of day and duration of calls — without warrants linked to specific investigations is an act of mass burglary.
"By doing that, you're invading the privacy of an individual's home, in effect," he said. "You're breaking in."
Klayman said the NSA does have authority to collect electronic records of terror suspects or people connected to terrorists.
The problem, he said, "is that they're obtaining the phone records of nearly everybody in this country, including myself, and I communicate with some of the other plaintiffs as an attorney. They're breaking into my attorney-client privilege, which is the most sacrosanct of all privileges in the law."
He praised Leon as "courageous" for ruling against the government in December.
"The reality is that, as Judge Leon [wrote] in his order, the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies haven't foiled one terrorist attack with this overly broad surveillance program, which involves every American, not just those in connection with terrorists, " said Klayman.
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