Whistleblower revealed collection of phone records to Guardian. Court says officials who defended dragnet were not telling truth. Edward Snowden at a videoconference in Estoril in May 2017. Snowden wrote on Twitter: ‘I never imagined that I would live to see our courts condemn the NSA’s activities as unlawful.’.
US 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 on Wednesday that those claims were “inconsistent with the contents of the classified record”.
Snowden, who fled to Russia in the aftermath of the 2013 disclosures and still faces US 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.
In a ruling handed down on Wednesday, the US 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.
Seven years after the 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 US intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth.