The FISA Court just rejected the NSA’s request to hold onto to phone metadata forever:

A federal surveillance court has rejected the Obama administration’s bid to hold onto millions of phone records beyond the current five-year limit.

The ruling is a rare rebuke for the government from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The court has rejected less than 1 percent of government spying requests over the past 30 years.

But Judge Reggie Walton said he found the Justice Department’s argument for extending the retention of phone records “simply unpersuasive.”

Government lawyers had argued that they needed to retain the data as evidence for the slew of privacy lawsuits filed in the wake of Edward Snowden’s leaks about National Security Agency surveillance. The American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and other groups are suing to shut the program down, claiming it violates the constitutional rights of millions of Americans.

………

But the federal judge noted that none of the privacy groups have tried to force the NSA to hold onto the data for their lawsuits. He wrote that the groups are seeking “the destruction of the [telephone] metadata, not its retention.”

Walton concluded that there is no legal requirement for the NSA to retain the data, and that any motivation for retaining the records is outweighed by the privacy harm.

Without Snowden, there would never have been the lawsuits, and even if there had been the suits, without the focus on the rubber stamp nature of the FISA court, the request would simply have been quietly granted.

Thank you Edward Joseph Snowden.