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Seven years after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed the mass surveillance of Americans’ phone records, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that program illegal and that U.S. intelligence officials lied publicly.
In a 59-page ruling, the court said the mass collection and analysis of citizens’ phone metadata violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and may well violate the Constitution.
Meanwhile, Snowden has been holed up in Russia for seven years, and U.S. authorities have yet to drop the espionage charges against him.
Snowden said on Twitter that it was this fact — the illegality of mass surveillance — that prompted his decision to release evidence of the NSA’s internal operations. “I never thought I’d live to see our courts condemn the NSA’s activities as illegal and, in the same ruling, credit me with exposing them”, Snowden wrote.
In 2013, Snowden leaked top-secret documents about the global surveillance programs of the American and British intelligence agencies to the media, winning Pulitzer Prizes for the articles in The Guardian and The Washington Post .
Perhaps the most sensational of the revelations was evidence that the NSA had secretly been building a vast database of U.S. phone records metadata—who spoke on their cellphones, when, where, and with whom.
Until then, top intelligence officials had publicly insisted that the NSA had never knowingly collected information about Americans. Since the revelations, U.S. officials have returned to the argument that spying has played a critical role in combating extremism at home, citing in particular the case of four San Diego residents accused of helping religious fanatics in Somalia.
US officials had insisted that the four were convicted in 2013 thanks to the NSA’s mass phone surveillance program. But the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled on Wednesday that those claims were “inconsistent with the contents of the classified documents.” That means they contradict the documents and are essentially false, too.
Watchdog groups including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which helped file an appeal in the “extremists” case, welcomed the judges’ ruling on the NSA spying program. “Today’s decision is a victory for our privacy rights”, the ACLU said in a statement. “It is clear that the NSA’s mass collection of Americans’ phone records violates the Constitution”.
The phone-tracking program began without a court order under President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. A similar program was approved by the secret FISA court in early 2006 and repeatedly renewed, but the 9th Circuit said those decisions were legally flawed.
The appeals court stopped short of directly ruling that the Constitution was violated, but rejected the Justice Department’s argument that the metadata collection was not a search because customers voluntarily shared such information with phone providers, in line with 40 years of legal precedent.
“NSA collected the telephone metadata of millions of Americans on an ongoing, daily basis for many years,” Judge Marsha Berzon wrote in her dissenting opinion. “Moalin [one of the defendants in the extremism case] could have had a reasonable expectation of privacy regarding the metadata of his calls”.
The 9th Circuit essentially upheld a 2015 ruling by New York’s 2nd Circuit Court., that mass surveillance is not closely enough linked to any specific investigation, that is, a court order within the framework of a specific investigation cannot legalize mass data processing.
Russia also has programs of mass surveillance of the population, like the NSA.
On July 7, 2016, President Putin signed the Yarovaya-Ozerov package adopted by the parliament and the Federation Council with amendments to Russian legislation, including amendments to the Law on Communications. Communication operators and organizers of information dissemination on the Internet are obliged to store all user traffic for up to six months - text messages, voice information, images, sounds, video, and other electronic messages. Communication operators are obliged to store metadata - information about the facts of reception, transmission, delivery of messages and calls - for three years. Internet providers are obliged to store such information for one year.
The FSB insists on decryption of TLS/SSL traffic in real time before recording it in storage. To this end, it is planned to deploy a Russian CA to issue "correct" SSL certificates.
The "Yarovaya" amendments came into force on July 1, 2018, but de facto the law does not yet work. At the moment, Russian operators are completing the modernization of the technical infrastructure for mass data storage.
Source
In a 59-page ruling, the court said the mass collection and analysis of citizens’ phone metadata violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and may well violate the Constitution.
Meanwhile, Snowden has been holed up in Russia for seven years, and U.S. authorities have yet to drop the espionage charges against him.
Snowden said on Twitter that it was this fact — the illegality of mass surveillance — that prompted his decision to release evidence of the NSA’s internal operations. “I never thought I’d live to see our courts condemn the NSA’s activities as illegal and, in the same ruling, credit me with exposing them”, Snowden wrote.
In 2013, Snowden leaked top-secret documents about the global surveillance programs of the American and British intelligence agencies to the media, winning Pulitzer Prizes for the articles in The Guardian and The Washington Post .
Perhaps the most sensational of the revelations was evidence that the NSA had secretly been building a vast database of U.S. phone records metadata—who spoke on their cellphones, when, where, and with whom.
Until then, top intelligence officials had publicly insisted that the NSA had never knowingly collected information about Americans. Since the revelations, U.S. officials have returned to the argument that spying has played a critical role in combating extremism at home, citing in particular the case of four San Diego residents accused of helping religious fanatics in Somalia.
US officials had insisted that the four were convicted in 2013 thanks to the NSA’s mass phone surveillance program. But the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled on Wednesday that those claims were “inconsistent with the contents of the classified documents.” That means they contradict the documents and are essentially false, too.
Watchdog groups including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which helped file an appeal in the “extremists” case, welcomed the judges’ ruling on the NSA spying program. “Today’s decision is a victory for our privacy rights”, the ACLU said in a statement. “It is clear that the NSA’s mass collection of Americans’ phone records violates the Constitution”.
The phone-tracking program began without a court order under President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. A similar program was approved by the secret FISA court in early 2006 and repeatedly renewed, but the 9th Circuit said those decisions were legally flawed.
The appeals court stopped short of directly ruling that the Constitution was violated, but rejected the Justice Department’s argument that the metadata collection was not a search because customers voluntarily shared such information with phone providers, in line with 40 years of legal precedent.
“NSA collected the telephone metadata of millions of Americans on an ongoing, daily basis for many years,” Judge Marsha Berzon wrote in her dissenting opinion. “Moalin [one of the defendants in the extremism case] could have had a reasonable expectation of privacy regarding the metadata of his calls”.
The 9th Circuit essentially upheld a 2015 ruling by New York’s 2nd Circuit Court., that mass surveillance is not closely enough linked to any specific investigation, that is, a court order within the framework of a specific investigation cannot legalize mass data processing.
Russia also has programs of mass surveillance of the population, like the NSA.
On July 7, 2016, President Putin signed the Yarovaya-Ozerov package adopted by the parliament and the Federation Council with amendments to Russian legislation, including amendments to the Law on Communications. Communication operators and organizers of information dissemination on the Internet are obliged to store all user traffic for up to six months - text messages, voice information, images, sounds, video, and other electronic messages. Communication operators are obliged to store metadata - information about the facts of reception, transmission, delivery of messages and calls - for three years. Internet providers are obliged to store such information for one year.
The FSB insists on decryption of TLS/SSL traffic in real time before recording it in storage. To this end, it is planned to deploy a Russian CA to issue "correct" SSL certificates.
The "Yarovaya" amendments came into force on July 1, 2018, but de facto the law does not yet work. At the moment, Russian operators are completing the modernization of the technical infrastructure for mass data storage.
Source
