A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that the National Security Agency's controversial collection of Americans' phone records, first revealed by Edward Snowden, is not legal under the Patriot Act.
The program gathers up bulk telephone records to enable targeted searches based on telephone numbers or other identifiers associated with terrorist organizations.
A three judge panel held that the text of the Patriot Act "cannot bear the weight the government asks us to assign to it and that it does not authorize the telephone meta date program."
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