Security News > 2020 > September > Snowden was right: US court deems NSA bulk phone-call snooping illegal, possibly unconstitutional, and probably pointless anyway

It's been a long time coming, and while some might view the decision as a slap for officials that defended the practice, the three-judge panel said the part played by the NSA programme wasn't sufficient to undermine the convictions of four individuals for conspiring to send funds to Somalia in support of a terrorist group.

Snowden made public the existence of the NSA data collection programmes in June 2013, and by June 2015 US Congress had passed the USA FREEDOM Act, "Which effectively ended the NSA's bulk telephony metadata collection program," according to the panel.

The panel took a long, hard look at the metadata collection programme, which slurped the telephony of millions of Americans and concluded that not only had the Fourth Amendment of the constitution likely been violated, it certainly flouted section 1861 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which deals with access to business records in foreign intelligence and international terrorism investigations.

"On the merits," the ruling said, "The panel held that the metadata collection exceeded the scope of Congress's authorization in 50 U.S.C. 1861, which required the government to make a showing of relevance to a particular authorized investigation before collecting the records, and that the program therefore violated that section of FISA.".

The panel went on to administer a light slapping to those insisting that the metadata programme was an essential element in the case.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/09/03/nsa_metadata_collection/