The case was argued in November 2016, two days after Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the presidential race. The court took almost seven years to render its legal judgment on Moalin’s appeal, filed in November 2013. The release of the 59-page opinion Wednesday is another reminder of the exceedingly slow pace of some 9th Circuit appeals, particularly those involving classified information or FISA surveillance. The revamped system appears to have been abandoned by the NSA in 2018 or 2019. The metadata program was officially shut down in 2015 after Congress passed the USA FREEDOM Act, which provided a new mechanism where phone providers retained their data instead of turning it over to the government. Joyce, who retired from the FBI several years ago, did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment. “To the extent the public statements of government officials created a contrary impression, that impression is inconsistent with the contents of the classified record,” she wrote. But Berzon goes on to suggest that the public claims by Joyce or others were inaccurate because the metadata program did not play a pivotal role. The new 9th Circuit opinion cites congressional testimony by former FBI official Sean Joyce that the metadata program gave agents a break that led to them reopening the investigation into Moalin. And the Moalin case was not about any plans for attacks in the U.S., but in Somalia. Other examples cited by officials were primarily overseas. “Having carefully reviewed the classified FISA applications and all related classified information, we are convinced that under established Fourth Amendment standards, the metadata collection, even if unconstitutional, did not taint the evidence introduced by the government at trial.”ĭuring the public debate over the program - triggered, as the opinion notes in half a dozen places, by disclosures from Snowden - numerous officials pointed to the Moalin prosecution as concrete evidence that the program was contributing to U.S. “Based on our careful review of the classified record, we are satisfied that any lack of notice, assuming such notice was required, did not prejudice defendants,” she wrote. But she said even if Moalin and his co-defendants had clear notice of that, it wouldn’t have helped their defense. The 9th Circuit panel essentially endorsed a 2015 ruling from the New York-based 2nd Circuit that found the mass surveillance was not sufficiently tied to any specific investigation, as Congress appeared to require.īerzon said the defendants were entitled to notice that the foreign-intelligence-related surveillance contributed to the case, but not necessarily the details of how. “Moalin likely had a reasonable expectation of privacy in his telephony metadata - at the very least, it is a close question.”īerzon’s opinion was jointed by Judge Jacqueline Nguyen, an appointee of President Barack Obama and Judge Jack Zouhary, who was appointed by President George W. “Here the NSA collected Moalin’s (and millions of other Americans’) telephony metadata on an ongoing, daily basis for years,” wrote Berzon, an appointee of President Bill Clinton. The appeals court stopped just short of saying that the snooping was definitely unconstitutional, but rejected the Justice Department’s arguments that collecting the metadata did not amount to a search under a 40-year-old legal precedent because customers voluntarily share such info with telephone providers. A similar program was approved by the secretive FISA Court beginning in 2006 and renewed numerous times, but the 9th Circuit panel said those rulings were legally flawed. The call-tracking effort began without court authorization under President George W. Judge Marsha Berzon’s opinion, which contains a half-dozen references to the role of former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden in disclosing the NSA metadata program, concludes that the “bulk collection” of such data violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
0 kommentar(er)
