The Supreme Court declined Monday to resolve the constitutionality of the National Security Agency's bulk telephone metadata surveillance program, leaving intact what a lower-court judge described as an "almost-Orwellian" surveillance effort in which the metadata from every phone call to and from the United States is catalogued by US spies.

The move by the justices comes as the Obama administration and Congress consider dramatically revamping the spy program disclosed in June by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The petition before the justices, brought by political activist Larry Klayman, concerned a December decision by US District Judge Richard Leon, who wrote in an opinion that America's founders would be "aghast" (PDF) at the spying. The President George W. Bush appointee stayed his decision, which concluded that the program infringes the Fourth Amendment, pending appeal because of the case's national security implications.

Klayman bypassed a federal appeals court and went directly to the high court, which rarely plucks cases from district courts before they're heard at the federal appellate level. In urging the high court to decide the issue, Klayman argued in his petition that the "case is of such imperative public importance that it justifies deviation from normal appellate practice and requires immediate consideration and determination in the Supreme Court" (PDF).

Legal scholars had predicted that, because the case was not ripe, the high court would turn a deaf ear to Klayman's petition. Still, there was a glimmer of a chance that the justices would have accepted Klayman's case and decided the outcome of what is likely the biggest constitutional crisis the Supreme Court has been presented with in the digital age.

That's because the Supreme Court has taken cases before they went to the federal appellate level. Those disputes, which seemingly pale in comparison to the NSA surveillance at issue, involved the constitutionality of the US Sentencing Commission, the value of a floundering railroad, a coal strike, and the eviction of an Ohio tenant from a housing rental.

The high court's inaction Monday means the future of the phone surveillance program will most likely play itself out in the political theater before the judicial arena. Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the stated provision allowing the bulk collection, expires June 1, 2015.

There are some 30 different legislative packages in Congress on the topic. And Obama said he wants to overhaul the surveillance process altogether by removing the metadata from the possession of the nation's spooks.

Under Obama's plan, the metadata database—which includes the phone numbers of all calls, the international mobile subscriber identity number of mobile callers, the calling card numbers used in calls, and the time and duration of those calls to and from the United States—would remain in the hands of the phone companies.

With the president's proposal, which requires congressional approval or an executive order, the telephone companies could only divulge data to the NSA regarding a specified terror target and associated contacts with the permission of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court.

Accessing those records is possible on a much weaker standard than under a Fourth Amendment probable-cause analysis. The Obama administration says the data can be accessed with "reasonable articulable suspicion" that a target is believed to be associated with terrorism.