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It’s been a good seven years since whistleblower Edward Snowden began publicizing the NSA’s surveillance practices. A US federal court has ruled that a US secret service telephone monitoring program it uncovered was illegal.
This is Snowden’s first exposure since June 2013, which started the NSA surveillance scandal. The secret collection of phone data from millions of Americans without authorization was a violation of the law on the supervision of foreign intelligence and counterespionage and was possibly unconstitutional, the court ruled Wednesday. It also found that the heads of the secret services, who had publicly defended the program against criticism, had lied.
Former intelligence officer Snowden, who fled to Russia in the course of his revelations and is still threatened with trial for espionage in his home country, saw the verdict on Twitter as a rehabilitation of his decision to have made the program public. NSA wiretapping. “I never thought I would see our courts condemn the NSA’s activities as illegal and, in the same trial, they give me credit for exposing them.” In the sentence, published here by the American civil rights organization ACLU, among others, the complainant is mentioned several times.
The revelation of the program caused a sensation, especially in the United States: the publication in the “Guardian” revealed that the secret service was collecting data on who was talking to whom, when, how long the conversation lasted and where the participants were. Until then, secret service officials had publicly insisted that the NSA had never knowingly collected information on Americans. After the show was revealed, they argued that surveillance was critical to the fight against terrorism in the United States.
As a concrete example, the case of four San Diego men who were accused of sponsoring religious fanatics in Somalia was cited. The NSA’s telephone monitoring program led to the men being captured, authorities said. It was precisely this case that was at stake: the court decided, however, that comprehensive telephone surveillance had not been decisive for the transfer of the convicted person. In this sense, therefore, the falsehood has been said.
Subsequent revelations from the Snowden fund revealed in the months and years that followed that the US wiretapping scandal had global proportions. In addition to mass surveillance of Internet users, important politicians have also been known to deliberately spy on them. Among other things, SPIEGEL revealed that a cell phone belonging to German Chancellor Angela Merkel had been on a US bug list for years.
