The National Security Agencys program of collecting phone records, deemed lawful by a Manhattan federal judge, was challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union as the most sweeping surveillance operation ever directed against the American public by the government.

The ACLU urged a three-member appeals panel to overturn the lower court ruling at a hearing in New York today.

The lawsuit filed in June 2013 is one of several challenging the NSAs data collection program, first revealed by former contractor Edward Snowden. A U.S. district judge in Washington called the program almost Orwellian in a December ruling and said it probably violates constitutional privacy rights. The Obama administration appealed the ruling.

The ACLU is a customer of Verizon Business Network Services, which was secretly ordered by a national security court to turn over data on customers, according to a report in the Guardian newspaper that cited Snowdens documents. The order required the company to turn over on an ongoing daily basis phone call details such as who calls are placed to and from, and when those calls are made, the group said.

The ACLU alleged the records collection exceeds the limits set by the Patriot Act, a law passed after the 2001 terrorist attacks that expanded the governments surveillance and data collection efforts to combat terrorism.

While the collection is indeed broad, the scope of counterterrorism investigations is unprecedented, District Judge William H. Pauley III wrote in a December 27 order. The question of whether that program should be conducted is for the other two coordinate branches of government to decide.

The case is American Civil Liberties Union v. Clapper, 13-cv-03994, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).

To contact the reporter on this story: Bob Van Voris in federal court in Manhattan at rvanvoris@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Michael Hytha at mhytha@bloomberg.net Joe Schneider, Peter Blumberg

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NSA Data-Sweep Lawfulness Challenged in NY Appeal Hearing