A San Francisco federal judge prevented the US government from obliterating evidence that were related to cases of illegal spying filed against the National Security Agency, Bloomberg News reported.

According to US District Judge Jeffrey White, all the evidence that had to do with the lawsuits lodged against the NSA by Electronic Frontier Foundation must be kept intact. These included records, documents, storage tapes, emails and even telephone records that would typically be destroyed five years after they were gathered, that were relevant to the claims that the privacy rights group filed against the agency contesting its surveillance programs, the report said.

Edward Snowden, the former security contractor of the agency, revealed in leaked documents that a government program gathered phone records by the bulk. EFF said the data collection was a violation of the right to privacy, the report said.

The US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in Washington had earlier directed the US government to destroy the records that the agency had gathered that were already five years old on the grounds that the right to privacy of the individuals whose records were included in the database was more important than the need to keep them for litigation purposes, the report said.

On March 10, however, White gave a temporary restraining order to stop the records from being destroyed until further determination could be made on the use that the collected data would have in the lawsuits related to the EFF. This prompted the Surveillance Court to allow the NSA to keep the records. Today, White told NSA and US Justice Department lawyers to tell their clients to stop the practice of routinely destroying records that would be necessary to the cases. He also directed them to give him a statement by April 21 stating that they had complied with the order, the report said.