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Judge won't delay NSA surveillance lawsuit

A federal judge in San Francisco has turned down the Justice Department's request to halt a surveillance-related lawsuit because of the partial government shutdown.

San Francisco-based U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White issued a one-page order Wednesday refusing to stay legal action in First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. National Security Agency, a lawsuit in which 22 groups are challenging the NSA's collection of telephone call records.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represents the plaintiffs in the case, opposed the stay. EFF lawyers argued that if NSA could keep snooping, government lawyers could keep responding to the litigation.

White didn't offer any reason for refusing to suspend action in the case. His order (posted here) adds the word "denying" to the order the government submitted.

In what could be viewed as a sign of passive-aggressive frustration over the shutdown, the judge struck out virtually all the text in the proposed order. Typed in at the bottom is the single sentence: "All deadlines shall remain as previously set."

The San Francisco laws is one of several legal challenges to the call-tracking program former NSA contractor Edward Snowden exposed in June. The program collects and stores so-called metadata on virtually every telephone call made to, from or within the United States in the past five years.