The court in charge of overseeing NSA surveillance has nixed a plan to keep American phone records in government databases for longer than five years. In an opinion published today, Judge Reggie Walton said that privacy protection laws overrode the governments argument that it needed to retain evidence for EFF and ACLU lawsuits, denying a request that the Department of Justice made in February. Such a move would further infringe on the privacy interests of United States persons whose telephone records were acquired in vast numbers and retained by the government, said Walton. The government seeks to retain these records, not for national security reasons, but because some of them may be relevant in civil litigation in which the destruction of those very same records is being requested.