Pre-Snowden, I wonder if the ruling would have been different. Back then the judges would only know what was presented to them. The government would have obviously presented in a way that was most favorable to them, and their opposition would not have access to crucial evidence.
Now that the cat shit is out of the bag, judges and everyone else have more background to evaluate what's in front of them. The government would still present in a way favorable to them. But a judge would now more fully understand the significance of what's presented to him. We live in the world, and we bring our entire experience to bear when we evaluate.
This case would have been impossible without Snowden.
Previous attempts to litigate the legality of mass collection of data had failed based on problems with the "standing" of plaintiffs. Specifically, the people who sued could only say that it was implicit that the government had collected data on them, but they had no actual evidence that it had happened -- specifically, to them.
That specificity is necessary to have standing in cases against the government, as a longstanding principle that you can't just use the courts to claim the government is violating the constitution or doing something wrong in a general way, you have to present courts with a specific controversy and specific facts that yielded specific damages and have specific redress.
That specificity was provided by Snowden when he turned over copies of the actual subpoena/requests to Verizon by the NSA. The ACLU was then able to say, we are actual customers of Verizon on the dates in question, and this order is asking for actual information on us, specifically.
Without Snowden this issue would never have reached this point and this decision -- which indeed has ruled illegal the NSA's mass metadata collection of telephony records -- would have never happened.
There probably wouldn't have been a ruling at all. The court itself states that Snowden was the principle catalyst for this case to ever go to court in the first place.
From the judgement:
"Americans first learned about the telephone metadata program that appellants now challenge on June 5, 2013, when the British newspaper The Guardian published a FISC order leaked by former government contractor Edward Snowden".
While that's amusing, it's an imperfect summary of the problem. DOJ had the Patriot Act in a drawer before 9/11. The Patriot Act wasn't read in full by any member of the Senate before it was voted on. And Section 215 was grossly reinterpreted, by both Bush and Obama administrations, according to that section's author, Jim Sensenbrenner.
It's said NSA doesn't have a moral compass, it's basically the components of a chess set. It just does what it's told. So really some criticism goes to a lazy, unimaginative, or ignorant Congress for not fully understanding the Patriot Act and how administrations (especially the more suspicious elements within them) would interpret and use Section 215 to give credibility to what they want to do. And more criticism goes to the FBI for telling the NSA to engage in bulk collection and FISA court for permitting it, and by extension the president (both of them) mainly for leaving this program on autopilot and also defending it.
A task for historians, is to what degree each president really actively defended bulk collection and believed in its appropriateness, vs what was politically possible with the expectation a future court would become involved in unwinding something that president really didn't approve of but merely accepted.
Actually, bureaucracies, especially defense and intelligence bureaucracies, have a culture and an agenda of their own. They wield enough power (both in absolute and complexity terms) to be able to push the political executive far beyond what said executive would have wanted. Do you think Barack Obama ever dreamed of authorizing drone strikes (i.e. assassination of civilians) around the world before becoming a politician?
It's because of the revolving door between government agencies and the corporations that supply their equipment. Crony capitalism where the bids that are accepted are based solely on the connections the contractors have.
I think this quote applies here: "Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power" - Mussolini
The meaning of the question is that Obama hadn't thought he himself would authorize drone strikes until he became president himself. Not that Obama hadn't imagined the existence of drone strikes.
Better, make a script that sends that back as a packet to every government IP that attempts a connection with your computer. Eventually, somebody is going to look at a logfile.
Now that the cat shit is out of the bag, judges and everyone else have more background to evaluate what's in front of them. The government would still present in a way favorable to them. But a judge would now more fully understand the significance of what's presented to him. We live in the world, and we bring our entire experience to bear when we evaluate.
Thank you Snowden. Fuck you NSA.