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The court's three-judge panel unanimously "held that the metadata collection exceeded the scope of Congress's authorization in 50 U.S.C. § 1861, which required the government to make a showing of relevance to a particular authorized investigation before collecting the records, and that the program therefore violated that section of FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act)," the ruling said.

The judges also wrote that "the government may have violated the Fourth Amendment when it collected the telephony metadata of millions of Americans, including at least one of the defendants." But the judges didn't make a ruling on the potential Fourth Amendment violation because it wasn't necessary to decide the case. While "the Fourth Amendment requires notice to a criminal defendant" when prosecutors want to use evidence from surveillance at trial, the judges "did not decide whether the government failed to prove any required notice in this case because the lack of such notice did not prejudice the defendants," the ruling said.

The NSA's bulk collection that "swept up the full call records of every customer of America's biggest telephone companies," authorized by the USA Patriot Act in 2001, "was banned in 2015 as part of the USA Freedom Act," a Project on Government Oversight report notes. The program was replaced by a more targeted collection of phone-company records, which was reportedly halted in 2018.