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The court's ruling is the latest step toward putting the

July 2, 2017 by Devin Jones

The court's ruling is the latest step toward putting the internet free of government intrusions, which the government has sought to maintain for years. In recent days, it has brought several cases to the federal courts in the past few months to challenge the NSA's bulk collection program, which the government argues is necessary for national security.

But as with the NSA's bulk data collection program, the court's decision also sends an explicit message that the government can't force the data to be stored on a server that's connected to the Internet. Indeed, this is likely just the tip of the iceberg in the surveillance state. It is the only court that has been able to intervene in the NSA's requests for data over the last six years.

The court's decision may also serve as a wake-up call to the NSA's new tactics, which include the use of wiretapping techniques that are increasingly being deployed by governments to monitor Internet activity.

In an opinion posted by Judge William O'Neill, the court also noted that the court had found that the Department of Justice's requests for information about the NSA's surveillance program "were "incidentally broad," even though the NSA has not yet disclosed the extent of the information collected.

And the court said the "substantial burden" of disclosing "the extent of the information collected by a foreign agency or a foreign power in the United States is not unreasonable."

The court's ruling was accompanied by a statement by the Department of Justice that it will "continue to vigorously fight" the Obama administration's push to give the Justice Department broad access to the NSA's metadata programs, and that the Department will continue to do so without court comment.

The decision also serves as a key illustration of how effective encryption—the use of technology that makes it impossible for governments to eavesdrop on every person who visits a website—is. The NSA's PRISM program has been on the books for two years, and is widely considered the most powerful surveillance program in history.

In 2010 the Obama administration, under pressure from Congress and from the intelligence community, began rolling out the PRISM program. The government obtained "significant" amounts of data by hacking the servers of Chinese phone companies and other Chinese entities. It then applied its PRISM program to more than a dozen other Chinese entities as part of the program, giving the NSA broad access to the American phone data of 1.2 million individuals and businesses.

In 2009, the New York Times reported that the NSA was conducting mass collection of phone records through the PR