A US court has found the National Security Agency's mass surveillance via phone tapping of Americans, revealed seven years ago by whistleblower Edward Snowden, unlawful. The US Court of appeals for the ninth district on Thursday said it found the program unlawful and that US intelligence officials who defended the program were lying. The court said the US government may have violated the Fourth Amendment and did violate Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The ruling was made in a case brought forth by four Americans, who were convicted for domestic terrorism for funding a Somalian terrorist organisation. The US government's recordings of tapped phone calls made by them was key to their conviction. Until Snowden revealed evidence to the contrary, US intelligence officials publicly insisted that the NSA never knowingly collected information on Americans. https://twitter.com/snowden/status/1301251393832050688 In 2013, Snowden made public that the NSA was secretly collecting phone call records and metadata from telecom companies, as well as emails, video chat recordings, including those of Americans. The US government had authorised this surveillance in classified orders by a FISA court. The dragnet required major telecom companies to turn over on an "ongoing daily" basis a large volume of their call records. This included local calls and those made to other countries. The agency was allowed to tap those within three hops from its target, as the Guardian as showed here. If you were suspected of being involved with terrorism activity, you could be tapped, along with your friends, and their friends.…
Please subscribe to MediaNama. Don't share prints and PDFs.
You May Also Like
News
Google has released a Google Travel Trends Report which states that branded budget hotel search queries grew 179% year over year (YOY) in India, in...
Advert
135 job openings in over 60 companies are listed at our free Digital and Mobile Job Board: If you’re looking for a job, or...
News
By Aroon Deep and Aditya Chunduru You’re reading it here first: Twitter has complied with government requests to censor 52 tweets that mostly criticised...
News
Rajesh Kumar* doesn’t have many enemies in life. But, Uber, for which he drives a cab everyday, is starting to look like one, he...