A federal judge has upheld the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of U.S. telephone data just days after a separate court reached an opposite opinion. On Friday, District Judge William Pauley dismissed a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union challenging the NSA’s mass collection of U.S. phone records. Pauley said telephone metadata could have potentially prevented the 9/11 attacks by alerting the government to hijackers who made phone calls from the United States. The issue will likely head to the Supreme Court. Pauley’s ruling comes less than two weeks after another federal judge questioned the program’s constitutionality and described the bulk collection as “almost Orwellian.”