A U.S. circuit court has concluded its review of a terrorism financing
case that begin in 2010, saying that the NSA's phone tapping was illegal
but that it was a minor part of the evidence.
In the final decision on
a criminal case that began a decade ago, an appellate court has said
that the National Security Agency’s phone data collection practices were
in fact illegal. They did, however, uphold the convictions in the case.
According to the 9th Circuit Court’s Sept. 2 opinion in USA v. Moalin:
We
conclude that the government may have violated the Fourth Amendment and
did violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”) when it
collected the telephony metadata of millions of Americans.
The
court continued to attack the program, writing that the government’s
case neglects that “the collection of millions of other people’s
telephony metadata, and the ability to aggregate and analyze it, makes
the collection of Moalin’s own metadata considerably more revealing.”
Despite
denouncing the overall program, the court upheld Moalin’s conviction on
the basis that the role of phone metadata in the case was minor
relative to the government’s use of recorded calls, which were
legitimate:
The government’s principal evidence against
defendants consisted of a series of recorded calls between Moalin, his
codefendants, and individuals in Somalia, obtained through a wiretap of
Moalin’s phone.
A
California court initially indicted Basaaly Saeed Moalin alongside three
co-conspirators back in July 2010 for financing Somali extremist group
al-Shabab. The court found them guilty of five counts related to money
laundering and terrorism financing. The four sent $10,900 to al-Shabaab
over the course of 2008.
The NSA cited the trio’s 2013 conviction
as a flagship success of the agency’s data collection program. The
program, which began under the Bush administration shortly after the
9/11 attacks, has been wildly controversial since its revelation in 2014
by Edward Snowden.
It is in the aftermath of the Snowden
revelations that Moalin, a cab driver, saw his appeal attract national
attention. The 2015 Freedom Act effectively ended the NSA’s phone
surveillance program, but ominous is that it lasted as long as it did
without attracting any whistleblowers prior to Snowden, who remains in hiding.
Snowden
and fears of dystopian government surveillance became central to
conversations about untangling networks from centralized actors.
Alongside Wikileaks,
one of the first organizations to accept Bitcoin, the revelations of
phone tapping spurred a great deal of public interest in
cryptocurrencies and other technologies resistant to government
intrusion.
The NSA, for its part, has had a number of its hacking tools hijacked, most famously the EternalBlue exploit that became the basis for the Wannacry malware that plagued 2017.
source link : https://cointelegraph.com/news/us-federal-court-calls-nsa-s-mass-phone-data-collection-illegal
