A federal appeals court ruled on Wednesday that a National Security Agency program that collected the metadata from billions of phone calls made by Americans was illegal and possibly unconstitutional despite upholding the conviction of four Somali immigrants charged in a terror-fundraising case in which the information was used. "Moalin likely had a reasonable expectation of privacy in his telephony metadata — at the very least, it is a close question." The 9th Circuit Court took up the case federal appeals court in New York in 2015 had ruled the mass surveillance of phone calls was illegal. Another similar one was approved by the secretive FISA Court in 2006 – and renewed a number of times since – but the appeals court ruled that those rulings were legally flawed. The NSA last year reportedly recommended that the White House abandon the controversial surveillance program, claiming the legal and logistical burdens of maintaining it outweigh its benefits to the intelligence community.

Source: Fox News September 02, 2020 22:18 UTC