Illegal wiretaps ruled OK

July 7, 2007
Illegal wiretaps ruled OK

A sharply divided federal appeals court in Cincinnati handed the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program a major legal victory Friday, ruling that the American Civil Liberties Union and several other plaintiffs did not have standing to challenge the program.

The 2-1 decision by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sent the case back to a federal trial judge in Detroit and ordered her to dismiss the case, reversing a ruling the judge had issued last year that the program was unconstitutional.

U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor had rejected the argument, saying that three publicly acknowledged facts about the government's surveillance program were sufficient to establish standing.

Taylor noted that the government had acknowledged, after the program was disclosed in a New York Times article in 2005, that it was eavesdropping on international telephone and e-mail communications in which at least one of the parties was suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda and that the surveillance was being conducted without warrants.