A three-judge federal appeals panel in the nation’s capital on Friday reversed a landmark 2013 ruling against the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of U.S. call records.

But the decision isn't a crushing blow to the privacy advocates, and it doesn't end the case.

Rather than dismiss the lawsuit brought by activist attorney Larry Klayman, the panel vacated a stayed preliminary injunction and sent the case back to U.S. District Judge Richard Leon for a decision on whether to allow discovery that would bolster plaintiffs’ standing to sue.

Leon’s 2013 ruling was the first and thus far only U.S. District Court ruling against the collection, which the judge called “almost Orwellian” and said was a likely violation of the Fourth Amendment. Unlike the appeals court panel, he surmised that Klayman and fellow Verizon Wireless customers had their records taken.

The appeals judges wrote, however, that Klayman and his co-plaintiffs cannot currently prove that Verizon Wireless is affected by the call-record dragnet, and that they therefore have no legal standing to challenge the collection.

The government only acknowledges its collection and retention of bulk records from Verizon Business Network Services, which was named in a document from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that was leaked to the press by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

One of the appellate judges, David Sentelle, wrote the case should be dismissed, rather than remanded for possible discovery. "Without standing there is no jurisdiction. Without jurisdiction we cannot act," he wrote.

Klayman tells U.S. News he's confident of ultimate victory at the Supreme Court, where privacy advocates hope for a ruling countering the decades-old third-party doctrine that the government says makes the record collection constitutional. That legal theory says there's no reasonable expectation of privacy for records that are voluntarily shared with a business.

"What I find to be an outrage is that they waited," Klayman says. "They could have written this decision two hours after the appeal was filed."

The ruling comes nearly 10 months after oral arguments presented by a Justice Department lawyer against Klayman and legal allies. In the interim, a federal appeals panel in New York earlier this year found the collection wasn’t permitted by Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which the Bush and Obama administrations secretly convinced Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judges allows for the phone-record dragnet.

The appeals court win by the American Civil Liberties Union, which is a Verizon Business Network Services customer, preceded Congress' passage of the USA Freedom Act, which is slated to end the automatic bulk collection of call records by the government later this year, though stored records cannot be purged pursuant to preservation of evidence orders given to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which also is challenging the program.

A third case against the collection, brought by Idaho nurse Anna Smith, is awaiting an appeals court ruling. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit heard oral arguments in that case in December.

Klayman says he believes discovery will be allowed by Leon, whom he holds in high regard. He takes a dim view, however, of the judges who remanded the case.

"They are kissing the behinds – the derrieres – of the people in the Washington, D.C., establishment who got them their jobs," he says. "An ill-informed, first-year law student could have written the ruling in a day."

Klayman's courtroom presentations often feature revolutionary rhetoric comparing President Barack Obama to King George III – not ludicrous, he says, pointing out Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts mentioned the American Revolution in the 2014 case Riley v. California, in which the court mandated warrants before police inspect an arrested person's cellphone.

"This explains the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders – the American people have lost confidence in all three branches of government and we're back in 1776," Klayman adds. "We are in a revolutionary state. The American people are in the mood to trash the entire city of Washington, D.C. What prevents it is we now have the NSA."