US Court Rules Mass Surveillance Program Exposed by Snowden Was Illegal
By Raphael Satter, Reuters
03 September 20
Seven years after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden
blew the whistle on the mass surveillance of Americans' telephone records,
an appeals court has found the program was unlawful - and that the U.S.
intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth.
In a ruling handed down on Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
Ninth Circuit said the warrantless telephone dragnet that secretly collected
millions of Americans' telephone records violated the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act and may well have been unconstitutional.
Snowden, who fled to Russia in the aftermath of the 2013 disclosures and
still faces U.S. espionage charges, said on Twitter that the ruling was a
vindication of his decision to go public with evidence of the National
Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping operation.
"I never imagined that I would live to see our courts condemn the NSA's
activities as unlawful and in the same ruling credit me for exposing them,"
Snowden said in a message posted to Twitter.
Evidence that the NSA was secretly building a vast database of U.S.
telephone records - the who, the how, the when, and the where of millions of
mobile calls - was the first and arguably the most explosive of the Snowden
revelations published by the Guardian newspaper in 2013.
Up until that moment, top intelligence officials publicly insisted the NSA
never knowingly collected information on Americans at all. After the
program's exposure, U.S. officials fell back on the argument that the spying
had played a crucial role in fighting domestic extremism, citing in
particular the case of four San Diego residents who were accused of
providing aid to religious fanatics in Somalia.
U.S. officials insisted that the four - Basaaly Saeed Moalin, Ahmed Nasir
Taalil Mohamud, Mohamed Mohamud, and Issa Doreh - were convicted in 2013
thanks to the NSA's telephone record spying, but the Ninth Circuit ruled
Wednesday that those claims were "inconsistent with the contents of the
classified record."
The ruling will not affect the convictions of Moalin and his fellow
defendants; the court ruled the illegal surveillance did not taint the
evidence introduced at their trial. Nevertheless, watchdog groups including
the American Civil Liberties Union, which helped bring the case to appeal,
welcomed the judges' verdict on the NSA's spy program.
"Today's ruling is a victory for our privacy rights," the ACLU said in a
statement, saying it "makes plain that the NSA's bulk collection of
Americans' phone records violated the Constitution."
