FISA Warrantless Section 702 Searches Unconstitutional, Court Rules

In a landmark ruling, a federal judge ruled that warrantless searches conducted under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) violate the Fourth Amendment.

Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall of the Eastern District of New York concluded the FBI violated a U.S. resident’s Fourth Amendment rights by utilizing evidence from FISA Section 702 and the resident’s private messages to secure a conviction.

Oh so we not gonna discuss this?

Oh okay. pic.twitter.com/cgTP0oUQnH

— MajToure999 (@MajToure999) January 23, 2025

From the ACLU:

The court’s opinion addresses numerous queries the FBI conducted of the defendant, Mr. Agron Hasbajrami, during an investigation years ago. The government initially hid its use of Section 702 in Mr. Hasbajrami’s case and others, reversing course only after the Department of Justice’s policy of wrongly concealing Section 702 surveillance in criminal cases came to light.

“This is a major constitutional ruling on one of the most abused provisions of FISA,” said Patrick Toomey, deputy director of ACLU’s National Security Project. “As the court recognized, the FBI’s rampant digital searches of Americans are an immense invasion of privacy, and trigger the bedrock protections of the Fourth Amendment. Section 702 is long overdue for reform by Congress, and this opinion shows why.”

The decision follows a groundbreaking 2019 ruling by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which recognized that Section 702 queries of people in the United States are searches that trigger separate Fourth Amendment scrutiny. The court of appeals sent the case back to the lower court for further constitutional analysis, culminating in yesterday’s ruling. While the new opinion holds that the FBI’s Section 702 queries violated the Fourth Amendment, the court ultimately denied the defendant’s motion to suppress the resulting evidence on separate grounds.

BREAKING: This is HUGE news.

FISA was ruled unconstitutional. pic.twitter.com/RzVYDWNQmw

— Mila Joy (@MilaLovesJoe) January 23, 2025

US Government Back Door FISA Searches Are Unconstitutional: Federal Judge https://t.co/NCQLCMwyhQ

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 24, 2025

Per Cato Institute:

In brief, defendant Agron Hasbajrami was arrested on September 6, 2011, before boarding a flight to Turkey to, according to the federal prosecutors, “travel to the Federally Administered Tribal Area of Pakistan, where he expected to join a terrorist organization, receive training, and ultimately fight against U.S. forces and others in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

Federal authorities used FISA Section 702 evidence to secure Hasbajrami’s conviction, but only after Hasbajrami had been in jail did the Justice Department disclose to the court—for the first time—that “some of the evidence it had previously disclosed from FISA surveillance was itself the fruit of earlier information obtained without a warrant pursuant to Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, 50 U.S.C. § 188 1a et seq. (‘Section 702’).”

In this case, the 702 information in question on Hasbajrami was obtained by FBI agents querying the vast FISA Section 702 database, which Democratic and Republican administrations have argued does not require a warrant.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals denied Hasbarjami’s blanket evidence suppression motion for the exclusion of all FISA Section 702 collection in his case but did not weigh in on whether the warrantless Section 702 database queries were constitutional, instead remanding the case back to Judge Hall for a review of that question. Hall subsequently agreed with Hasbarjami’s argument that “inadvertent acquisition of Defendant’s communications does not automatically permit the government to search among the acquired communications without a warrant.”

Massive Legal Victory: Judge Rules FISA Backdoor Surveillance Unconstitutional https://t.co/QpzJiTzmve

— Boone Cutler (@boonecutler) January 23, 2025

Read the full ruling HERE.

This is a Guest Post from our friends over at 100 Percent Fed Up.

View the original article here.