A federal district court has delivered a pivotal ruling that strikes at the heart of unchecked government surveillance. In the criminal case United States v. Hasbajrami, the court determined that backdoor searches of vast databases containing Americans’ private communications — collected under Section 702 — typically require a warrant. This judgment comes after more than a decade of legal battles and follows the Second Circuit Court of Appeals’ 2019 finding that such searches constitute “separate Fourth Amendment events,” leaving it to the lower court to address the warrant requirement. That question has now been resolved.
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) grants the intelligence community the authority to collect communications between foreign targets, ostensibly for national security purposes.
However, when these exchanges involve individuals on US soil, their communications are also intercepted and stored. Federal agencies have claimed that accessing this data for searches doesn’t require additional judicial oversight. For years privacy groups have argued this practice violates the Fourth Amendment. Now, a court has finally concurred.
The case revolves around Agron Hasbajrami, a US resident arrested at JFK airport in 2011 as he prepared to travel to Pakistan. He was accused of providing material support to terrorists. The government later disclosed that its evidence included emails between Hasbajrami and an unnamed foreigner allegedly “linked” to terrorist groups. These emails had been warrantlessly collected through Section 702 programs and later searched — again without a warrant — using terms associated with Hasbajrami.
While Section 702 permits the surveillance of communications involving foreign nationals, the court ruled that such a broad “foreign intelligence exception” cannot routinely override the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement when those communications are searched by law enforcement.
Hellbound and Down 