The nation's only successful challenge to the National Security Agency's bulk telephone metadata surveillance program lasted just one day, as a federal appeals court is allowing the constitutionally suspect program to continue unabated.

The day-long constitutional victory Monday impacted a handful of American lawyers but was blocked Tuesday by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The government said it would have to shutter the entire program because it was technologically incapable of immediately sifting out the lawyers from the hundreds of millions of people the NSA was routinely spying on. So instead of shuttering the program altogether, the appeals court acquiesced to the government's concerns and blocked enforcement (PDF) of the lower court's Monday order.

The outcome means that not a single person has successfully convinced the US court system to halt the surveillance program NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden divulged in the summer of 2013. There were plenty of constitutional challenges, too, but none resulted in a decision like Monday's where a federal judge had ordered the NSA to immediately cease spying on the plaintiffs in a lawsuit.

Meanwhile, the spying program, in its current form, expires November 29. It is to be replaced with a more privacy-minded spying alternative that still allows the NSA to obtain the phone records of Americans but without the probable-cause standard set by the Fourth Amendment.

The appeals court, meanwhile, stayed the Monday ruling "until further order of the court." The appellate court said it has not yet decided "the merits" of the government's request to block the lower court's order to stop spying on attorney J.J. Little and the few other attorneys at his law firm that brought the challenge. The appeals court said it wanted more briefing submitted by November 16, 13 days before the program expires. The appellate court issued its order Tuesday, hours after the President Barack Obama administration made the request.

"The government respectfully asks that this Court enter a stay as early as possible; otherwise, the government could be forced to abruptly terminate an important counter-intelligence program in toto, while it continues a burdensome and technically difficult process to prevent collection of and analytic access to any metadata associated with only the Little plaintiffs," the Justice Department wrote (PDF) to the appeals court.

Snowden disclosed that the nation's telecoms forward to the NSA the phone numbers of both parties in all calls, calling card numbers, the length and time of the calls, and the international mobile subscriber identity (ISMI) number for mobile callers. The NSA keeps a running database of that information. The NSA says it queries the data solely to combat terrorism and that one party of a call must be believed to have been overseas.

Under the new program, the metadata will remain with the telcos, but the government may access it against suspected terrorism targets with a secret court's approval.