While Judge Richard Leon's decision does nothing to curb the illegal and unconstitutional domestic spying by the NSA, this extraordinary description nonetheless stands as an acknowledgment that the US government is guilty of methods appropriate to a police state.
Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who exposed the existence of the NSA domestic spying dragnet, justifiably claimed the decision as a vindication of his decision to expose these secret operations to the American and world public.
"I acted on my belief that the NSA's mass surveillance programs would not withstand a constitutional challenge, and that the American public deserved a chance to see these issues determined in open courts," Snowden said in a statement. "Today, a secret program authorized by a secret court was, when exposed to the light of day, found to violate Americans' rights."
In his ruling, Judge Leon, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, said of the NSA's "metadata" surveillance program: "I cannot imagine a more 'indiscriminate' and 'arbitrary' invasion than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without judicial approval."
He ridiculed the government's claim that a 1979 US Supreme Court decision involving police acquisition of phone records of a robbery suspect over a two-day period could serve as a precedent legalizing wholesale spying on the American people more than three decades later.
Even more significantly, the judge rejected the core pretext invoked by the Obama administration, and the Bush administration before it, to justify not only unrestrained domestic spying, but every other attack on democratic rights at home and every act of militarist aggression abroad: the war on terror.
Leon pointedly observed that the government failed to cite "a single case in which analysis of the NSA's bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent terrorist attack." He based his decision in part on "the utter lack of evidence that a terrorist attack has ever been prevented" by "searching the NSA database."
The decision found that the practices of the NSA almost certainly violated the core democratic rights guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, which affirms "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures."
While the ruling covered only the two individual plaintiffs who brought the case, the judge found that without injunctive relief not only would they suffer irreparable harm, but that the public at large would be in jeopardy, given the "unprecedented scope" of the NSA's spying operations.
In spite of all of these conclusions, however, Judge Leon, "in light of the significant national security interests at stake in this case," agreed to stay his order issuing an injunction against the NSA spying operation pending the government's appeal -- a process that would take more than six months and potentially years before ending up in the US Supreme Court.
Thus, in the end, the ruling merely provided a cowardly echo of the drumbeat heard from every layer of the US political establishment: democratic rights must be abrogated to serve the interests of "national security."
The response of the Obama administration -- brought into office on promises of "transparency" and "change" -- has been one of utter indifference to the historically unprecedented assault on constitutional rights embodied in the NSA spying, a defense of the agency's police state methods and a vilification of Snowden for revealing them.
Nowhere in the political establishment is there any suggestion that government officials, including the president himself, should be held accountable for these criminal operations. To the extent that there has been any response, it is to try to repackage the NSA operations to ensure that the domestic spying continues. This is expressed most clearly in Obama's presidential advisory committee, which is preparing recommendations aimed at affirming and institutionalizing all of the agency's spying programs, while attempting to divert popular anger with empty talk of "restraint" and "reform."
Other court cases remain to be heard, including those brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, based on the same revelations made six months ago by Edward Snowden. Given the record of the courts -- including that of the Supreme Court -- it is altogether likely that each of these cases will end with similar deference to the "war on terror," "national security" and state secrecy.
In a moving "Open letter to the people of Brazil," published in the daily Folha de Sao Paulo Tuesday, Snowden debunked these pretexts, writing that "these programs of dragnet mass surveillance that put entire populations under an all-seeing eye and save copies forever ... were never about terrorism: they're about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power."
