The NSA Continues to Violate Americans' Internet Privacy Rights
By Patrick Toomey, Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project
AUGUST 22, 2018 | 5:30 PM

A federal court will be scrutinizing one of the National Security Agency’s worst spying programs on Monday. The case has the potential to restore crucial privacy protections for the millions of Americans who use the internet to communicate with family, friends, and others overseas.

The unconstitutional surveillance program at issue is called PRISM, under which the NSA, FBI, and CIA gather and search through Americans’ international emails, internet calls, and chats without obtaining a warrant. When Edward Snowden blew the whistle on PRISM in 2013, the program included at least nine major internet companies, including Facebook, Google, Apple, and Skype. Today, it very likely includes an even broader set of companie

The government insists that it uses this program to target foreigners, but that’s only half the picture: In reality, it uses PRISM as a backdoor into Americans’ private communications, violating the Fourth Amendment on a massive scale. We don’t know the total number of Americans affected, even today, because the government has refused to provide any estimate.

This type of unjustifiable secrecy has also helped the program evade public judicial review of its legality because the government almost never tells people that it spied on them without a warrant. Indeed, the government has a track record of failing to tell Americans about this spying even when the person is charged with a crime based on the surveillance. That’s one reason why this case is so important — this time, the government has admitted to the spying.

In this case, the government accused a Brooklyn man, Agron Hasbajrami, of attempting to provide material support to a designated terrorist organization in Pakistan. After he pleaded guilty to one of the charges, the government belatedly admitted that it had read through his emails without a warrant.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/privacy-and-surveillance/nsa...

Link to ACLU brief:

https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/us-v-hasbajrami-brief-amici-curiae-a...

I doubt anything will change. But there’s always hope.