Phone surveillance is still legally fine for now,...

Phone surveillance is still legally fine for now, the U.S. District Court for Idaho ruled without enthusiasm Tuesday in Anna Smith v. Barack Obama. The eight-page ruling is bound to the legal reasoning of the 1979 Smith v. Maryland Supreme Court case, which has been used to uphold the government’s bulk collection of phone metadata, it said. But differences have emerged since that case, the court ruling argued. The National Security Agency collection “goes beyond the telephone numbers that Smith dials, and reaches into her personal information,” the court said, also pointing to location information as particularly revealing. Thus the Supreme Court should reconsider Smith v. Maryland, the court said.