Calif. Court Orders Preservation of Disputed NSA Phone Records

An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from a report at PC World: "A court in California has prohibited the destruction of phone records collected by the government until further orders, raising a potential conflict with an order last week by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in Washington, D.C. Judge Jeffrey S. White of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ordered Monday the retention of the call details in two lawsuits that have challenged the U.S. National Security Agency's program for the collection of telephone metadata. A number of lawsuits challenging the NSA program have been filed by privacy and other groups ... On Friday, Reggie B. Walton, presiding judge of the FISC, denied a motion from the Department of Justice that the current five-year limit for holding phone metadata should be extended indefinitely as it could be required as evidence in the civil lawsuits challenging the program."

Custody of the Data

[surmak]

If the data is needed as evidence in the case, then the court should take custody of it and require all other copies to be destroyed. That way the information is available for the trial, but cannot be (ab)used for any other purpose by the NSA.

Another option would be for the parties to stipulate on what data has been stored, and then proceed in the trial on that assumption.