It's been 7 years since @Snowden revealed the full scope of the @NSAGov's mass surveillance program, something only hinted at by Mark Klein's 2006 whistleblowing over @ATT's role in illegal domestic surveillance.
wired.com/2013/06/nsa-wh…
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wired.com/2013/06/nsa-wh…
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In the years since, the NSA and its apologists have spun their lawless conduct in two ways: first, the insisted that domestic surveillance had foiled innumerable domestic terror plots, and second, that it was all legal.
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The question of whether surveillance catches terrorists has an unambiguous, empirical answer: it does not. In all the years that the NSA spied on every single American, they caught one criminal: someone making a small-dollar donation to Al Shabab.
nytimes.com/2020/02/25/us/…
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nytimes.com/2020/02/25/us/…
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But the legal question was thornier: the NSA's legal experts advanced theories to explain why what they did was legal under the (admittedly farcically broad) Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and why FISA was legal under the Constitution.
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Most people who understood both FISA and the Constitution disagreed, but it was up to a court to decide. And now it has. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that NSA surveillance was illegal under both FISA AND the Constitution.
uk.reuters.com/article/uk-usa…
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uk.reuters.com/article/uk-usa…
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This absolutely vindicates Snowden, who remains in exile in Russia. Snowden has promised to return to the US and stand trial, on condition that it be held in open court with a jury.
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Trump, meanwhile, has mooted pardoning him in what is almost certainly an irrelevant distraction tactic (this is true of nearly everything Trump muses about aloud).
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What Snowden did was heroic, and his personal account of why he did it should be required reading for everyone involved in tech, security and surveillance:
boingboing.net/2019/09/24/par…
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boingboing.net/2019/09/24/par…
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