A federal judge ruled Monday that the National Security Agency's phone surveillance program is likely unconstitutional, Politico reports.

U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon said that the agency's controversial program, first unveiled by former government contractor Edward Snowden earlier this year, appears to violate the Constitution's Fourth Amendment, which states that the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated."

“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 it and analyzing it without judicial approval,” Leon wrote in the ruling.

The federal ruling came down after activist Larry Klayman filed a lawsuit in June over the program. The suit claimed that the NSA's surveillance “violates the U.S. Constitution and also federal laws, including, but not limited to, the outrageous breach of privacy, freedom of speech, freedom of association, and the due process rights of American citizens."

AMY GOODMAN: This is the National Security Agency that is, of course, the subject of so much global controversy right now, the NSA gathering this intelligence to give to the apartheid regime.

ANDREW COCKBURN: That’s right. I mean, it was—it was just absolutely routine. And, you know, we have to—this was all—maybe they would have done it anyway, but it was certainly in the Cold War context. I mean, there was—it’s hard to remember now what a sort of lather people got into about, you know, the Soviet threat to the trade routes. And there was a naval base, African naval base—or there is one at Simon’s Town, near the Cape. And there was, I remember, sort of the right—the defense lobby were continually going on about the terrible threat of the Soviets maybe getting hold of, you know, Simon’s Town, seizing vital facilities.

And it was an absolute—I mean, people, not surprising—well, people have sort of forgotten just how—what a Cold War battleground southern Africa was. Not only did they turn over Mandela, but they had this very close relationship. U.S. military intelligence cooperated very closely with South African military intelligence, giving them information about what was going on, what they were collecting in the rest of southern Africa. And, in fact, you know, the two countries—CIA and the South Africans collaborated on, you know, assisting the UNITA in the horrible civil war in Angola that went on for years and years with thousands of people dying. So, you know, this wasn’t just a flash in the pan, the tip-off that led to the coordination on the arrest of Mandela. It was absolutely a very deep, very thorough relationship that went on for decades.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, in that vein, I wanted to ask you about the 1996 report by Jeff Stein in Salon that the CIA was involved in sabotaging the ANC for years.

ANDREW COCKBURN: That’s right.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Stein quotes Mike Leach, a former South African intelligence operative who worked closely with the CIA, and Leach claimed that the CIA shared the recipe for a prussic acid, a, quote, "clear compound which, if inhaled, would give a massive coronary. If a doctor’s not looking for [prussic] acid he’ll put (the cause of death) down to natural causes." Another trick, Stein writes, was to, quote, "launder anti-apartheid T-shirts in a fiberglass solution and hand them out to demonstrators, who would soon be convulsed in uncontrollable itching." The CIA reportedly also offered training in bugging and wiretaps.

ANDREW COCKBURN: Well, that’s right. It shows that, you know, this is the agency that gave us the exploding cigar sent to Fidel Castro, or designed to be sent to Fidel Castro. You know, the sort of fascination with these rather puerile tricks went on and, yeah, were considered. I’d never heard any report that they actually did manage to give anyone a coronary or cause them frantic itching, but it was certainly, certainly in the scheme.

I mean, there was, you know, the CIA—and the other side of it is, of course, the CIA was meanwhile spying on the South Africans and had very good report on the, for instance, the South African nuclear program and the collaboration, the very active collaboration, of the Israelis in that program, which they fed back to Washington, when of course nothing was ever done about it. So, you know, they knew perfectly well what was going on, but no action was ever taken.

127 of the children died from gunshots in their own homes, while dozens more died in the homes of friends, neighbors, and relatives.

72 of the young victims either pulled the trigger themselves or were shot dead by another kid.

In those 72 cases, only 4 adults have been held criminally liable.

At least 52 deaths involved a child handling a gun left unsecured.

60 children died at the hands of their own parents, 50 of them in homicides.

The average age of the victims was 6 years old.

More than two-thirds of the victims were boys, as were more than three-quarters of the kids who pulled the trigger.

The problem was worst over the past year in the South, which saw at least 92 child gun deaths, followed by the Midwest (44), the West (38), and the East (20).

CBS News learned Thursday that the information National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden has revealed so far is just a fraction of what he has. In fact, he has so much, some think it is worth giving him amnesty to get it back.

Rick Ledgett is the man who was put in charge of the Snowden leak task force by Gen. Keith Alexander, who heads the NSA. The task force's job is to prevent another leak like this one from happening again. They're also trying to figure out how much damage the Snowden leaks have done, and how much damage they could still do.

Snowden, who is believed to still have access to 1.5 million classified documents he has not leaked, has been granted temporary asylum in Moscow, which leaves the U.S. with few options.

JOHN MILLER: He's already said, "If I got amnesty, I would come back." Given the potential damage to national security, what would your thought on making a deal be?

RICK LEDGETT: So, my personal view is, yes, it's worth having a conversation about. I would need assurances that the remainder of the data could be secured, and my bar for those assurances would be very high. It would be more than just an assertion on his part.

MILLER: Is that a unanimous feeling?

LEDGETT: It's not unanimous...

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Lisa Graves, you’ve been monitoring the work of ALEC for a long time. Is such a pullout of funding and supporters in Congress unprecedented for ALEC? And if so, what do you think this might say about changes in the wider political culture? I mean, you pointed out that once, even—even given their opposition to divestment from apartheid South Africa, it didn’t actually change the strength of ALEC. So what accounts for it now, their support for Stand Your Ground as well as opposition to clean energy, etc.? Could you talk a little bit about that?

LISA GRAVES: Well, ALEC has tried to disavow its role in Stand Your Ground. It no longer has that task force, but it has done nothing to undo the damage done by pushing these bills into law across the country. I think what our work demonstrates, what the work of so many organizations—Color of Change, Common Cause, ProgressNow, Greenpeace, labor unions, citizen groups like VLTP and others who have spoken out about ALEC—I think what that demonstrates is the power of people speaking out. These corporations—many of these corporations do not want to be associated with these controversial policies that they’ve been funding behind closed doors through ALEC for many, many years in numerous instances. And so, I think it shows the power of people speaking up.

But I think that ALEC—I suppose that in one sense ALEC was right. ALEC was right to say that if divestment campaigns take hold, if people have a sense of power that they can speak out, that they can urge corporations to stop investing in controversial policies or in countries that are pushing such policies, like the extraordinary inhumanity of apartheid, that citizens will be empowered to encourage corporations to do more, to do better. And that’s what’s happened. That’s one of the things that ALEC was afraid of. They were afraid of having citizens be mobilized and shareholders be mobilized to get these companies to stop investing in terrible organizations.

It turns out that one of those organizations is ALEC, because ALEC has pushed forward this extreme agenda to privatize our schools, privatize Social Security, privatize Medicare and Medicaid, prisons—anything that isn’t nailed down and some things that are. It’s worked to devastate workers’ rights. It has worked to harm the ability of Americans whose family members are killed or injured by corporations to sue and hold those companies accountable. And it even, as you noted and as The Guardian reported, is trying to punish citizens who invest in putting solar energy on their roofs of their homes and that are giving energy back to the grid; they want to penalize them.

And so, ALEC is really an extreme organization. It’s a pay-to-play organization pushing corporate interests above all else, above our interests. And these lawmakers who are part of it are, in essence, debasing themselves by allowing corporations to have an equal say to themselves at these closed-door ALEC task force meetings, that Dana Milbank pilloried so effectively in The Washington Post this last week.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the State Policy Network, and what is that all about?

LISA GRAVES: Well...