Appeals Court won’t reconsider ruling upholding NSA spying

A federal appeals court declined to take up a lower court’s decision upholding National Security Agency surveillance, in a blow to privacy advocates who have called the agency’s data collection unconstitutional. In an order, Judge M. Margaret McKeown of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declared that critics of the NSA could not get a final judgment on just one component of their sweeping lawsuit.

The potential unconstitutionality of the NSA’s Upstream Internet collection could not be disentangled from the broader set of questions about the spy agency’s collection of people’s records, Judge McKeown insisted. As such, the matter should be considered alongside the full set of 17 charges brought against the NSA seven years ago, she ruled, and not in a “piecemeal” fashion, as the lawsuit attempted to do. “Both sides point fingers as to why no final decision has been reached,” McKeown wrote in the order. “We do not take sides in that debate, except to say that the parties’ and judicial resources would be better spent obtaining a final judgment on all of the claims, instead of detouring to the court of appeals for a piecemeal resolution of but one sliver of the case.”