Ruling In Favor Of NSA's Program Relied On Claims In 9/11 Report That Aren't Actually In That Report

by Mike Masnick
Techdirt
Dec. 31, 2013

The more people look at the ruling last week by Judge William Pauley saying that the NSA's bulk metadata collection is legal, the more perplexed they become. We noted multiple problems with the ruling last week, but at almost every turn is evidence that Judge Pauley not only came into the court with his decision already set, but that he took the government's claims at face value, even when they were flat-out factually incorrect -- and which could have been easily checked. We already noted that Pauley's argument that 9/11 could have been prevented with such a metadata collection had been widely debunked, but it's worse than that. Pauley's ruling cites the 9/11 Commission report for this particular argument. There's a big problem with that. The 9/11 Commission report doesn't even mention the story that Judge Pauley claims is in the report.

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