Court rules US warrantless wiretapping was illegal

Warrantless wiretapping, such as that conducted by the Department of Justice, is illegal

A US government warrantless wiretapping system set up in the wake of the 11 September attacks has been ruled illegal by a federal judge.

In a 45 page ruling (PDF) District Court Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that the National Security Agency's wiretapping of the now defunct Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a Saudi Arabian-backed charity, was in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

First the Bush administration, and lately the Department of Justice, had argued that national security issues made FISA irrelevant under "state secrets privilege".

However, in a blistering ruling, Judge Walker said that this was " argumentative acrobatics", and that the government should have got a warrant before monitoring.

"Under defendants' theory, executive branch officials may treat FISA as optional and freely employ the [state secrets privilege] to evade FISA, a statute enacted specifically to rein in and create a judicial check for executive-branch abuses of surveillance authority," Judge Walker said.

State-secrets privilege was set as legal precedent in 1953 when the US military won a Supreme Court case brought by the widows of airmen who had died in a B-29 crash.

The military argued that national security concerns were involved, although no sensitive data was found when the report into the crash was declassified in the 1990s.

The case will have a bearing on the ongoing case brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against AT&T over the installation of NSA spying rooms for the large-scale monitoring of private and business communications.

AT&T technician Mark Klein blew the whistle on the installation in 2006, and the government has been fighting the case ever since.