Court rules NSA surveillance program exposed by Snowden violated law but upholds terror convictions
(Worthy News) – A federal appeals court ruled on Wednesday that a key aspect of the mass surveillance program exposed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden was illegal, but it did not reach a conclusion on its constitutionality.
A three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit also upheld the convictions of four men who said they were monitored under the program for sending thousands of dollars to support the terrorist group al Shabab back in Somalia.
The panel found that the usage of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection program, which secretly collected information on millions of U.S. citizens’ phone calls and was exposed by Snowden, violated the law. But they declined to reach a decision on whether the program violated the Constitution because the judges concluded that the evidence used at trial was untainted by the program — despite claims from government officials who had tried to defend the since-shuttered NSA program, effectively ended by 2015’s USA FREEDOM Act, by pointing to the case as an example of one in which it was critical and necessary to obtain convictions. [ Source: Washington Examiner (Read More…) ]