Supreme Court rejects privacy group’s call to look at NSA’s collection of telephone records

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court is refusing to intervene in the controversy surrounding the National Security Agency, rejecting a call from a privacy group to stop NSA from collecting the telephone records of millions of Verizon customers in the United States.

While the justices on Monday declined to get involved in this issue, other lawsuits on the topic are making their way through the lower courts around the country.

But in the case at hand, the Electronic Privacy Information Center bypassed lower courts and said that only the Supreme Court can overrule a decision by the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose order allowing NSA to get the records cannot be reviewed by other federal courts.

The case is In Re Electronic Privacy Information Center, 13-58.