NSA’s Public Spying Revealed by Snowden Is Ruled Illegal.

The US Court of Appeals has ruled that the bulk collection of telephone metadata is unlawful. This is a landmark decision that clears the way for a full legal challenge against the National Security Agency.
    
A panel of three federal judges for the second circuit has overturned an earlier ruling that the controversial surveillance practice, first revealed to the US public by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013, could not be subject to judicial review.

But the judges also waded into the charged and ongoing debate over the reauthorization of a key Patriot Act provision currently before US legislators. That provision, which the appeals court ruled the NSA program surpassed, will expire on 1 June amid gridlock in Washington on what to do about it.
The judges opted not to end the domestic bulk collection while Congress decides its fate, calling judicial inaction “a lesser intrusion” on privacy than at the time the case was initially argued.
“In light of the asserted national security interests at stake, we deem it prudent to pause to allow an opportunity for debate in Congress that may profoundly alter the legal landscape,” the judges ruled.
But they also sent a tacit warning to Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate who is pushing to re-authorize the provision, known as Section 215, without modification: “There will be time then to address appellants’ constitutional issues.”
“We hold that the text of section 215 cannot bear the weight the government asks us to assign to it, and that it does not authorize the telephone metadata program,” concluded their judgment.
“Such a monumental shift in our approach to combating terrorism requires a clearer signal from Congress than a recycling of oft‐used language long held in similar contexts to mean something far narrower,” the judges added.
“We conclude that to allow the government to collect phone records only because they may become relevant to a possible authorized investigation in the future fails even the permissive ‘relevance’ test.
“We agree with appellants that the government’s argument is ‘irreconcilable with the statute’s plain text’.”

Senator Rand Paul, a Republican presidential candidate who has made opposition to over-broad surveillance central to his platform, tweeted: “The phone records of law abiding citizens are none of the NSA’s business! Pleased with the ruling.”
The White House stressed that it too supported an overhaul of the program, though declined to comment on the blow to the NSA’s existing legal authority. But opponents in Congress were emphatic that the ruling represented a breakthrough in their fight to rein in executive overreach on surveillance.

“Today’s court decision reaffirms what I’ve been saying since the Snowden leaks came to light. Congress never intended Section 215 to allow bulk collection,” said Republican Jim Sensenbrenner.
“This program is illegal and based on a blatant misinterpretation of the law. It’s time for Congress to pass the USA Freedom Act in order to protect both civil liberties and national security with legally authorized surveillance.”

The American Civil Liberties Union, which led the initial legal challenge against director of national intelligence James Clapper, predicted that its victory should force Congress to take a tougher approach.
Leading reformers in the Senate also urged Senator McConnell to allow a vote on the reform-minded USA Freedom Act rather than attempt to simply update existing legislation when it expires in a few days time.
This process apparently brings Snowden’s legal position into question and some are asking if he is now guilty as NSA and others have said. And others have asked, ‘How do I keep my phone conversations free from surveillance”.
Nobody – not your mobile provider, your ISP, or the phone manufacturer – can promise you that your phone conversations won’t be intercepted in transit. That leaves end-to-end encryption – using a trustworthy app whose makers themselves literally cannot break the encryption – your best play.

Signal’s code is open source, meaning it can be inspected by experts, and the app also supports forward secrecy, so if an attacker steals your encryption key, they cannot go back and decrypt messages they may have collected in the past.

Using Signal and Red Phone means your voice conversations are always full scrambled. 

Other apps with encryption tend to enter insecure modes at unpredictable times, unpredictable for many users, at least. Apple’s iMessages, for example, employs strong encryption, but only when communicating between two Apple devices and only when there is a proper data connection. Otherwise, iMessages falls back on insecure SMS messaging. iMessages also lacks forward secrecy and inspectable source code.

Signal also offers the ability for power users to verify the identity of the people they’re talking to, confirming that the encryption isn’t under attack. With iMessage, you just have to take Apple’s word for it. 

Intercept: http://bit.ly/1cw1AV9
Guardian: http://bit.ly/1cHu52d