U.S. District Judge Richard Leon’s flair for dramatic writing was on full display in his Dec. 16 opinion that took on a government surveillance program. The ruling featured expressive punctuation, sarcastic footnotes and sweeping criticism of the federal government’s secret monitoring efforts.
The U.S. Department of Justice’s position that a mass database of phone records might not include telecommunications giants Verizon Wireless, AT&T and Sprint? That “would be like omitting John, Paul, and George from a historical analysis of the Beatles,” the judge wrote in a footnote. “A Ringo-only database doesn’t make any sense.”
