Second Circuit Says Warrantless Backdoor Searches Of NSA Collections Might Violate The Fourth Amendment
from the stay-in-your-own-lane,-g-men dept
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has suggested -- not exactly ruled -- that backdoor searches of Section 702 collections targeting Americans (citizens and permanent residents) is a violation of the Fourth Amendment.
The case involves Agron Hasbajrami, a lawful permanent resident who was arrested in 2011 as he attempted to board a flight to Turkey. The government claimed Agron -- an Albanian immigrant -- was ultimately headed to Pakistan to join a terrorist organization.
Agron is somewhat of a unicorn. He's one of the few defendants that's actually been informed the evidence used against him was derived from NSA collections under Section 702. The DOJ is supposed to be proactive about this, but instead has chosen to emphasize parallel construction over transparency.
The evidence appears to have come from a backdoor search by the FBI. The FBI is allowed to access Section 702 collections, but domestic data and communications are supposed to be "minimized" to protect US persons swept up by the NSA. If the FBI performs backdoor searches to access Americans' communications that have been incidentally collected by the NSA foreign-facing surveillance programs, it should have to obtain a warrant. But that's not actually the case for a couple of reasons. First, very few defendants are ever informed of the true source of the evidence against them. Second, the secrecy shrouding the NSA's collections and the Intelligence Community's access prevents a lot of judicial examination in the few cases where evidence can actually be challenged.
The Second Circuit's ruling [PDF] kicks Hasbajrami's case back down to the lower court so it can reexamine the Fourth Amendment implications of warrantless backdoor searches. The Appeals Court has no problem with the NSA's collections, which putatively target foreigners. The court says these are lawful. Accessing collected communications from Americans via the NSA's collections, not so much.
The issue here isn't the collection itself or any inadvertent collection of US persons' communications. The problem is the querying of stored communications without a warrant when the target of the queries is a US person. The court doesn't say the FBI can't look at its own stored collections without a warrant to locate intelligence or evidence. Stuff it has already acquired is fair game, more or less. The court makes a physical analogy:
It is true the FBI does not need an additional warrant to go down to its evidence locker and look through a box of evidence it collected from a crime scene.
But that's where the analogy ends.
But lawful collection alone is not always enough to justify a future search.
Pointing to the Riley decision, the court notes that the lawful seizure of an arrestee's phone does not give law enforcement the right to perform a warrantless search of its contents.
Searching the FBI's own data stores tipped to it by the NSA isn't nearly as problematic as what the FBI appears to have done here: browsing the NSA's much larger collection without a warrant to find more communications originating from a US person. Say goodbye to any flattering "evidence locker" analogies.
If such a vast body of information [250 million emails as of 2011] is simply stored in a database, available for review by request from domestic law enforcement agencies solely on the speculative possibility that evidence of interest to agents investigating a particular individual might be found there, the program begins to look more like a dragnet, and less like an individual officer going to the evidence locker to check out a previously-acquired piece of evidence against some newfound insight.
And there's where the Fourth Amendment fits in:
To permit that information to be accessed indiscriminately, for domestic law enforcement purposes, without any reason to believe that the individual is involved in any criminal activity and or even that any information about that person is likely to be in the database, just to see if there is anything incriminating in any conversations that might happen to be there, would be at odds with the bedrock Fourth Amendment concept that law enforcement agents may not invade the privacy of individuals without some objective reason to believe that evidence of a crime will be found by a search.
The case returns to the lower court so it can consider the Fourth Amendment implications it chose to ignore when considering the defendant's motion to suppress evidence that is starting to look like it was acquired unconstitutionally.
If this results in suppression, this case is going to travel right back up the judicial ladder. There's no way the government is going to let its backdoor searches be subject to a warrant requirement. Warrants create paper trails, and the last thing the IC wants is more paperwork linking domestic surveillance to foreign-facing NSA collections. This isn't a win yet, but if the district court aligns itself with the Appeals Court's suggestions, it could be a game changer.
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Filed Under: 2nd circuit, 4th amendment, agron hasbajrami, backdoor searches, evidence, fbi, nsa, parallel construction, section 702
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Given how ridiculously easy it is for law enforcement to obtain a warrant, the fact they don't even bother speaks volumes about their respect for rhe Constitution.
Why bother with a basic cornerstone of the Fourth Amendment when you have a plethora of things ro give you a free pass ( QI, Third Party Doctrine, parallel construction, Good Faith Exception, etc...).
It's well past time the courts remind law enforcement of the Fruit of the Poisonous Tree Doctrine. If you can't gather your evidence legally, or if you insist on hiding how that evidence was obtained, you don't get to use it.
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Re:
Which means limiting the "Inevitable Discovery" free pass as well.
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Re: Why bother with the Fourth Amendment
yeah, the 4th is worthless unless the courts & elected officials strongly enforce it.
Police will always seek to bypass the 4th ... unless closely controlled
Judges & prosecutors are natural bureaucratic team mates with cops -- and give cops lots of slack on the 4th
This 2nd Court of Appeals ruling here is very weak and timid -- it accomplishes nothing for the public.
US Supreme Court has repeatedly weakened the 4th over past century, and is an unreliable defender.
Presidents & Congress directly control FBI/NSA and could easily force strict compliance with the 4th -- but most in Congress &White House care little about the 4th when it interferes with their law & order & surveillance agenda.
Who is it that is solemnly sworn (and well paid) to uphold the Bill of Rights and rest of Constitution ??
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Wadda they mean, might? The nsa collections do, so why would the 'backdoor searches' not?
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Re:
"Might", because some court is going to overturn this based on our lack of standing to sue, executive privilege, secret law, or some other legalistic bullshit like that (if not simply by saying "yeah, but it's important to fight crime").
You say the collection violates the Fourth Amendment, and it obviously does, yet we've known about this for decades with steadily increasing levels of detail and certainty, and no court's actually put a stop to it. They sometimes have harsh words, and then it keeps happening. Where's the government official in prison for 330,000,000+ counts of unlawful seizure?
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All evidence should be challengeable if anyone really can mount an honest defense. Without being able to mount an honest defense against a charge, everyone should just go home.
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Re: Due Process
good point
'Due Process' would demand that defendants have formal Discovery access to the specific NSA database uses as evidence against them ... and the NSA/FBI persons who managed that database.
But of course that cannot happen because judges and courts work for the government -- and the government protects itself first.
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Re: Re: Due Process
True, to a point. The people are the government, insomuch that they are aware that this is the case.
But warrantless police states make sure they blackmail everyone into complicity, so the citizens cannot effectively organize against it.
And thats what the US is right now.
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Whoops!
I bet someone got chewed out for letting that slip out.
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While the Fourth Amendment requires police to obtain a warrant before conducting a search, our Secret Police couldn't very well remain secret if they were required to do the same, could they? This disregard for the Constitution is what allows our Secret Police to be so secret, some people don't even realize we even have Secret Police!
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Re: Americas Secret Police
Thats a fact. They are a secret police by definition.
And they should be spoken about as such in order to take back the narrative.
The online community of gang stalking has an information and disinformation aspect to it, but the gang stalkers ALWAYS mention that they do not leave a paper trail, and Warrants create paper trail
That agency should be abolished, except for that Americas two parties each derive such valuable political dirt from the shitbags who work there.
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kill program whistleblowers
theree is more than one secret kill program besides anything you heard in the news and not publicly known, so called gangstalking is the use of derogatory information on a targets stolen/copyed compromised identity uses 'targeting information' from the PNC police database uk, your personal data gets in the wrong hands because ylou may be considered a political dissident if youve ever attended some kind of political/activist meeting that may be considered subversive or extremist, this gets you on the List! any criminal history is of course used against the targeted subject who is considered a political dissident, They use informants to steal your bags/rucksacks specifically to get any type of your personal id such as ID/passsport or administrative documents Pii, this then enables them to track the target via police databases, any criminal history or suspected serious crime they can use it to set them up and even frame them for murder with their stolen planted Identity papers, this and the derogatory information that is deliberatly put on the police intel database as ''targeting information'' the stolen passport or ID can have made up false information/intelligence to suggest the target is the worst despite any evidence! They can then simply frame the target with their stolen Identity paper inside stolen rucksack and leave it at the murder scene! This is your so called gangstalking, they get rid of their so called enemies by framing someone else who is ends up in prison or dead and someone else who had their personal id stolen and false murder suspect made up about them entered in the PNC or security services secret database as a false suspect a cover up fro the real killer by compromising the innocent targeted person and the cycle repeats, it is a secret kill program
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