Last month, in a filing with the notoriously secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the United States said that it wants to keep existing records beyond the existing five-year limit due to the handful of lawsuits challenging the National Security Agency’s bulk metadata collection program.

But on Friday, in a win for civil liberties advocates, a FISC judge denied (PDF) that motion.

Judge Reggie Walton writes:

The government cites three cases in support of its position: RFMAS Inc. v. So, Richard Green (Fine Paintings) v. McClendon, and Zubulake v. UBS Warburg LLC. Although the destruction of electronic records was an issue in all three cases… none of these cases involved a conflict between a litigant's duty to preserve electronic records and a statute or regulation that required their destruction. They merely demonstrate that, when triggered, a civil litigant's duty to preserve relevant evidence includes electronic records and that duty trumps a corporate document destruction policy. The Court has not found any case law [to] support the government's broad assertion that its duty to preserve supersedes statutory or regulatory authority. … The government’s contention that [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s] minimization requirements are superseded by the common-law duty to preserve evidence is simply unpersuasive.

The judge added that “the number of records is likely voluminous, and they undoubtedly contain United States person information, including information concerning United States persons who are not the subject of an FBI investigation.”

As we previously reported, the United States Department of Justice wanted to keep the records, as they pertained to some of the following cases: ACLU v. Clapper, Klayman v. Obama, Smith v. Obama, First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. NSA, Paul v. Obama, and Perez v. Clapper.

Of those, the judge in just one case so far has declared the bulk metadata dragnet unconstitutional. As we further reported in December 2013, a federal judge’s order granted an injunction to shut down the metadata program, and it required the government to destroy the metadata collected on the plaintiffs' accounts.

However, such a shutdown will only happen if an appeals court agrees with that federal judge, Judge Richard Leon, who has stayed the injunction pending appeal in Klayman v. Obama, "in light of the significant national security issues at stake in this case and the novelty of the constitutional issues."