The National Security Agency program that swept up details on billions of Americans' phone calls was illegal and possibly unconstitutional, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.
A similar program was approved by the secretive FISA Court beginning in 2006 and renewed numerous times, but the 9th Circuit panel said those rulings were legally flawed.
The appeals court stopped just short of saying that the snooping was definitely unconstitutional, but rejected the Justice Department's arguments that collecting the metadata did not amount to a search under a 40-year-old legal precedent because customers voluntarily share such info with telephone providers.
Berzon said the defendants were entitled to notice that the foreign-intelligence-related surveillance contributed to the case, but not necessarily the details of how.
During the public debate over the program triggered, as the opinion notes in half a dozen places, by disclosures from Snowden numerous officials pointed to the Moalin prosecution as concrete evidence that the program was contributing to U.S.
But Berzon goes on to suggest that the public claims by Joyce or others were inaccurate because the metadata program did not play a pivotal role.
The release of the 59-page opinion Wednesday is another reminder of the exceedingly slow pace of some 9th Circuit appeals, particularly those involving classified information or FISA surveillance.
Another recent 9th Circuit decision involving allegations of illegal surveillance took about six years to produce an opinion, also authored by Berzon.