Judge Rules Against Wiretaps

U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor issued the first court ruling against the legality of the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program. (By Amy Leang -- Detroit Free Press Via Associated Press)

Some Republicans sought to tie the ruling to last week's arrests in Britain and Pakistan of alleged conspirators in a plot to blow up airliners bound from London to the United States. The administration has not offered evidence that the NSA spying program played a role in the case. Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) said that halting the program "would hamper our ability to foil terrorist plots."

Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) and other leading Democrats hailed the ruling as a welcome check on the Bush administration. The decision shows that "no one is above the law," Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) said.

ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero called the decision "another nail in the coffin" of the Bush administration's anti-terrorism strategies. "The judge very clearly points out that this, at its core, is about presidential powers," he said.

The Justice Department argued that the NSA program is well within Bush's authority as president, but that proving it would require revealing state secrets. Taylor agreed with the ACLU and other plaintiffs that many details about the program had already been publicly acknowledged by numerous government officials, including Bush.

Taylor rejected one part of the ACLU's lawsuit seeking information about data mining -- the process of searching computer databases for information on individuals -- agreeing with the government that it would be impossible to allow that part of the case to go forward without divulging vital state secrets.

The ruling was hailed by lawyers involved in related, though legally separate, lawsuits elsewhere in the country. "We now have a ruling on the books that upholds what we've been saying all along: that this wiretapping program violates the Constitution," said Kevin Bankston, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, which has filed a class-action case against AT&T. The suit alleges that the telecommunications company collaborated with the NSA in its surveillance program.

Staff writer Ellen Nakashima and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.