Well, what do you know? A New York judge with common sense. In a ruling Friday that should (but won’t) silence critics, Manhattan federal Judge William Pauley found the National Security Agency well within its rights to collect metadata on phone and Internet activity.
And he should know. His courtroom overlooks the site of the World Trade Center, where America suffered its worst attack on its own soil, in part because it was caught totally blind to the plot.
Indeed, Pauley cited that attack — and the likelihood that, had NSA efforts been in place then, it might have been averted — as a key reason for his ruling.
Pauley’s conclusion contradicts one two weeks ago by another federal judge, Richard Leon of the District of Columbia, who bizarrely found the data collection likely unconstitutional. But in dismissing a lawsuit by the ACLU and the New York Civil Liberties Union, Pauley cited the testimony of the NSA’s director, Gen. Keith Alexander, who said that before 9/11 “we couldn’t connect the dots because we didn’t have the dots.” As the judge put it, the 9/11 attacks “succeeded because conventional intelligence-gathering could not detect diffuse filaments connected to al Qaeda.”
Now, thanks to Congress, the NSA has access to those dots — and, Pauley noted, “this blunt tool only works because it collects everything.” He noted that the metadata collection “is subject to extensive oversight by all three branches of government” and that only a tiny amount of the collected data actually is reviewed by intelligence analysts. Those reviews are no more unreasonable than the FBI reviewing data in its fingerprint or DNA databases, he says.
Most important: The NSA’s effectiveness “cannot be seriously disputed.”
Good for Judge Pauley. He seems to recognize where the public interest lies.