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For the American whistleblower Snowden it is a rehabilitation: a US federal court has now confirmed that the secret NSA surveillance he revealed was illegal. The court accused the heads of the US secret services of lying.
The US secret service NSA’s telephone surveillance program discovered by whistleblower Edward Snowden seven years ago was, according to a US federal court, illegal.
The secret collection of phone data from millions of Americans without authorization is a violation of the law on the supervision of foreign intelligence and counterespionage, the court ruled. It could have been unconstitutional. It also found that the heads of the secret services who publicly defended the program against criticism had lied.
Snowden: judgment is rehabilitation
Former secret service employee Snowden, who fled to Russia in the course of his revelations and is threatened with espionage in his homeland, interpreted the verdict on Twitter as a rehabilitation of his decision to have made public the wiretapping program of the NSA: “I never would have thought that I would see our courts condemn the activities of the NSA as illegal and, in the same verdict, they would credit me for reporting them.”
The show’s exposure in 2013 was the first of several revelations from Snowden that eventually revealed that the wiretapping scandal was global in scope and that numerous political leaders were also spied on. A cell phone belonging to German Chancellor Angela Merkel is said to have been the subject of clandestine wiretapping.
American intelligence: vigilance in the fight against terrorism
At first, top representatives of the American secret services had always publicly insisted that the NSA had never knowingly collected information about Americans. After the show was revealed, they argued that surveillance was critical to the fight against terrorism in the United States.
