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NSA spying exposed by Snowden was illegal and not very useful, court says:
The National Security Agency's bulk collection of phone metadata from telecom providers was illegal, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday. The court also found that the phone-metadata collection exposed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden was not necessary for the arrests of terror suspects in a case that the US government cited in defending the necessity of the surveillance program.
The ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit upheld the 2013 convictions of "four members of the Somali diaspora for sending, or conspiring to send, $10,900 to Somalia to support a foreign terrorist organization." But the Somalis' challenge of the NSA spying program yielded some significant findings. In part, the ineffectiveness of the phone-metadata collection helped ensure that the convictions would be upheld because the illegally collected metadata evidence wasn't significant enough to taint evidence that was legally collected by the government. The government got what it needed from a wiretap of defendant Basaaly Saeed Moalin's phone, not from the mass collection of metadata.
The court's three-judge panel unanimously "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 [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act]," the ruling said.
The judges also wrote that "the government may have violated the Fourth Amendment when it collected the telephony metadata of millions of Americans, including at least one of the defendants." But the judges didn't make a ruling on the potential Fourth Amendment violation because it wasn't necessary to decide the case. While "the Fourth Amendment requires notice to a criminal defendant" when prosecutors want to use evidence from surveillance at trial, the judges "did not decide whether the government failed to prove any required notice in this case because the lack of such notice did not prejudice the defendants," the ruling said.
(Score: 2) by NateMich on Friday September 04 2020, @09:41AM (3 children)
Most likely, yes.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday September 04 2020, @10:04AM (2 children)
Wow, that is some unabashed dehumanization.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2020, @12:45PM
Not really, why do you think the mentally ill are subhuman?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 05 2020, @11:40PM
Most everyone is some shade of crazy, religion just primes people with some seriously flawed crazy off the bat. Most people are unable to overcome the insanity, but a good chunk are able to integrate their faith with reality.
The tide is turning, the days when we have to just accept your religious insanity is over. People are allowed to say happy holidays without being screamed at by Christians who demand everyone act like them and believe what they believe. Christians have been persecuting non-christians in the US since forever, to the point of even treating Catholics as fake Christians.
So yeah, religion makes you crazy, but you're still human. There is hope for you if you can integrate with reality. Doubt you are capable though given your age and posts around here. My my how (lol) offended you get about anything critical of your Christianity, Whiteness, or Maleness. PC culture gone too far? Cancel culture out of control? Guess who invented that shit? Yup, white Christians with their martyred Wars on Christmas and other nonsense.