SurveillanceNSA’s Post-9/11 Mass Surveillance Program, Exposed by Snowden, Illegal: Court

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has ruled that the National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence’s surveillance program exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden was unlawful, and possibly unconstitutional.

The court on Wednesday the surveillance program was illegal, but the ruling stopped short of calling the program unconstitutional.

The BBC reports that the court said that the program, under which the NSA collected and analyzed bulk, or meta, data provided by telecommunications companies, was in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and could have been unconstitutional.

“Seven years ago, as the news declared I was being charged as a criminal for speaking the truth, I never imagined that I would live to see our courts condemn the NSA’s activities as unlawful and in the same ruling credit me for exposing them,” said Snowden, who fled to Russia after exposing the program, on Twitter. “And yet that day has arrived.”

Snowden still faces charges of espionage in the United States.

After initially denying that the intelligence agency collected information on Americans, officials maintained that the spying helped the country combat domestic extremism.

Supporters of the surveillance program often cite the case of four California residents — Basaaly Saeed Moalin, Ahmed Nasir Taalil Mohamud, Mohamed Mohamud, and Issa Doreh — who have been convicted of funding the Al-Shabaab extremist group in Somalia.

NSA’s domestic spying program helped get this conviction, and legal experts say the conviction will not affected by the latest ruling.

Critics of the program say that in addition to violating privacy rights, the program’s was ineffective: Billions of phone calls and email messages were collected and scanned over the years, but only a handful of terrorism suspects were seized, and even fewer were convicted.