“I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary’ invasion than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval.”

Those are the words of Judge Richard J. Leon of the Federal District Court of the District of Columbia as he denounced the National Security Agency yesterday in his ruling on Klayman vs. Obama. The judge, a George W. Bush appointee, ordered the NSA to stop collecting data on the personal calls of the two plaintiffs and destroy the records it has gathered on them. He stayed his injunction, giving the government time to appeal.

The case is the first where a federal judge not on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which authorized and rubber-stamps the operations of the once-secret surveillance program, has ruled on the NSA’s data collection on a non-criminal defendant.

In his 68-page ruling, Judge…