Federal Judge Inadvertently Confirms Existence of NSA Spying Program

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The National Security Agency’s data harvesting program, PRISM, has been the subject of much speculation and controversy since its existence was revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in 2013.

PRISM is widely regarded as “the NSA spying on everyone’s Internet activity” by the public, which is left to guess at the true extent of the program from a few scraps of hard data, since so much of it remains classified.  Recent stories have suggested the scope of NSA surveillance was considerably more narrow than critics feared, but now a ruling from a federal judge suggests that surveillance remains more broad than privacy activists might have hoped.

In essence, the case is about a man arrested on terrorism charges who got caught because the NSA intercepted emails he sent to someone else they had under surveillance.

Vocativ describes the defendant as Agron Hasbajrami, an Albanian citizen living in Brooklyn, who was arrested in 2011 and pled guilty to “trying to travel to Pakistan to join a militant jihadi group, as well as to wiring it money.”

After he was arrested, Hasbajrami was told his emails to another individual were swept up by the PRISM program.  He filed a motion to have the evidence against him dismissed, because the warrantless surveillance program violated his reasonable expectation of privacy.  If his motion had succeeded, the New York Law Journal cites his attorneys saying his guilty plea would have been vacated.
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