This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, September 4th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Federal Appeals Court says the now shuttered NSA Metadata program gathering data about your phone calls for years at a time

violated Americans rights. Edward Snowden, the man who told Americans about this

mass violation of rights, says he feels vindicated. Cato's Julian Sanchez discusses the ruling and what it may mean for other unwarranted snooping into the lives of Americans.

This appeals court ruling is being cast somewhat as a vindication of Edward Snowden who

revealed the NSA's bulk phone data collection.

So what did this appeals court say and do you feel like it is a vindication of Mr. Snowden's efforts to tell us about it?

Yeah, I mean there's a strange irony in the result of this case because the appellants, Bessale

Moaleen, who was convicted in 2013 of providing material support to the terror group Al-Shabaab that challenges

conviction on the grounds that information from the NSA bulk program was used as the basis of subsequent warrants that showed that he was sending

money.

And this should essentially require his conviction in 2013 to be overturned and he ultimately lost his

challenge failed but only because essentially the court said the information from this

NSC bulk program wasn't useful really after all that that in fact having reviewed the classified information the

FISA warrants obtained to wiretap Mullean and his associates were not in

any important way based on information from the USA bulk program.

And that's, I think, significant because this was really the one remaining case from the initial claims about this program and it was

disclosed where it seemed like well you could argue there was still some

utility from that now defunct program.

You know, initially when the Snowden story came out,

when the bulk telephony program was disclosed,

...