Supreme Court rejects review of NSA program

The US Supreme Court refused to get involved Monday in the controversy surrounding the National Security Agency.

Justices declined to hear a plea from a privacy group to stop the spy agency from collecting millions of phone records of Verizon customers.

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The case would have been the first major challenge to the NSA brought before the Supreme Court.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center claimed the NSA overstepped its statutory authority with the program, especially since the records specifically included calls made "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls."

An order by the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court allowing the collection of the phone records was revealed in June.

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Since then, the NSA has publicly acknowledged it received secret court approval to collect vast amounts of so-called metadata from telecom giant Verizon and leading Internet companies, including Microsoft, Apple, Google, Yahoo and Facebook.

Other lawsuits on the topic are making their way through the lower courts around the country.