Judge halts plan to destroy NSA phone surveillance records
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
A federal judge in San Francisco blocked the Obama administration Monday from destroying millions of records of National Security Agency telephone surveillance, issuing a nationwide order to preserve evidence for a half-dozen invasion-of-privacy lawsuits.
The NSA, which has acknowledged obtaining phone numbers and other information on all calls in the United States in its hunt for terrorists, was prepared Tuesday to destroy all records collected more than five years ago. The secretive court that approved the surveillance has required purging the documents after five years as a privacy measure, and denied the government's request Friday to extend that timetable for the pending lawsuits.
On Monday afternoon, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White of San Francisco, who is presiding over one of the suits, ordered the phone records left undisturbed until March 19, when he will hold a hearing on preserving them further.
White said he was simply enforcing an order he had issued in an earlier NSA surveillance case barring destruction of evidence. He said he would be unable to grant "effective relief" to the current plaintiffs if the government got rid of the records before he decided whether they were legally collected.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/nation/article/Judge-halts-plan-to-destroy-NSA-phone-5305045.php
= new reply since forum marked as read
(re: to the suspicious- in my mind- fire at a government agency which escapes me at the moment.) I was thinking it was connected to the Plame outing/Scooter Libby, but I could be wrong.
Its not nice to provide facts that hurts the agenda of some posters 
