Edward Snowden says judge's ruling vindicates NSA surveillance disclosures• NSA whistleblower welcomes Judge Richard Leon's ruling
• 'Programs would not withstand constitutional challenge'
• Judge: phone surveillance program likely unconstitutional
Dan Roberts and Spencer Ackerman in Washington
theguardian.com, Monday 16 December 2013 16.20 EST
Edward Snowden, the former security contractor who leaked a trove of National Security Agency documents, welcomed a court ruling on Monday that declared the bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records to be a likely violation of the US constitution.
Snowden said the ruling, by a US district judge, justified his disclosures. “I acted on my belief that the NSA's mass surveillance programs would not withstand a constitutional challenge, and that the American public deserved a chance to see these issues determined by open courts," he said in comments released through Glenn Greenwald, the former Guardian journalist who received the documents from Snowden.
"Today, a secret program authorised by a secret court was, when exposed to the light of day, found to violate Americans’ rights. It is the first of many,” said Snowden, whose statement was first reported by the New York Times.
Judge Richard Leon declared that the mass collection of so-called metadata probably violates the fourth amendment, relating to unreasonable searches and seizures, and was "almost Orwellian" in its scope.
Read more:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/16/edward-snowden-ruling-nsa-surveillanceOraclefemina
16 December 2013 9:48pm
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Having recently watched "The Most Dangerous Man in America," (the story of Daniel Ellsberg), it was quite interesting to hear the identical "national security" argument propounded by Richard Nixon at that time that we have heard from Barack Obama vis a vis Snowden. (Let's just say that Nixon let fly with far more colorful language, but who knows who says what in private, eh?)
