NEW YORK (AP) The U.S. government's interpretation of its authority under the Patriot Act is so broad that it could justify mass collection of financial, health and even library records of innocent Americans without their knowledge, a civil liberties lawyer warned Friday at a hearing on a lawsuit challenging a federal phone-tracking program.
A government lawyer, Stuart Delery, insisted that counterterrorism investigators wouldn't find most personal information useful. Analysis of phone records, however, has become an essential and legal tool to "find connections between known and unknown terrorists," he argued
"If you accept the government's theory here, you are creating a dramatic expansion of the government's investigative power," Jameel Jaffer, of the American Civil Liberties Union, told a judge in federal court in Manhattan..
U.S. District Court Judge William H. Pauley reserved decision on an ACLU request to halt the National Security Agency surveillance programs pending the outcome of its lawsuit against President Barack Obama's administration.
The ACLU sued earlier this year after former NSA analyst Edward Snowden leaked details of the secret programs that critics say violate privacy rights. The NSA-run programs pick up millions of telephone and Internet records that are routed through American networks each day.