The massive NSA telephone spying uncovered by Snowden did no

The US National Security Agency (NSA) broke the law by collecting metadata from citizens' phone calls, but this system did not help to stop any terrorist attacks, a US Court of Appeals court concluded on Wednesday. This ruling, which came in the context of appeals by four Somali nationals accused of financing terrorist groups, shows that the NSA program was not only illegal and possibly unconstitutional, but also failed to arrest terrorist suspects. The program, by which the United States security agency collected the metadata of the telephone calls of millions of users, was revealed by former CIA employee Edward Snowden in 2013. In the face of the scandal, the NSA defended itself by ensuring that this program It had served to prevent terrorist attacks .



Read more: The biggest technology scandals of the decade: from massive NSA espionage to fatal Boeing accidents or the WeWork crisis However, he could only point out one case, that of the American citizen Lithuania Mobile Number List of Somali origin Basaalay Moalin, accused of financing the terrorist group Al Shabaab, linked to Al Qaeda in Somalia. However, in its ruling this Wednesday, the Court of Appeal considered not only that the collection of this person's telephone metadata was illegal, but that it was irrelevant to his detention , as indicated in his ruling by Judge Marsha Berzon. The court decision, which will keep Moalin in prison — he was sentenced to 18 years for financing terrorist groups — indicates that even if the NSA had not illegally obtained his phone records, this would not have changed his sentence.







The judge also emphasizes in her ruling that the NSA broke the law by spying on the phone records of millions of American citizens. "The NSA collected the telephone metadata of Moalin and millions of other Americans daily for years," the judge concluded. Read more: Edward Snowden assures that governments will find it increasingly difficult to censor the Internet The US National Security Agency's telephone records collection program was stopped in 2015 with the USA Freedom Act , which establishes that companies must keep their customers' telephone metadata private, and researchers must seek judicial authorization to access them. However, the NSA program was not completely dismantled.