In a first, appeals court raises privacy questions over government searches for Americans’ emails

The government’s warrantless collection of emails and other Internet data for national security purposes is lawful, but searching that information for Americans’ communications raises constitutional privacy questions, a federal appeals court in New York ruled. At issue is an appeal by a former Brooklyn man who pleaded guilty to supporting a foreign terrorist group and now is seeking to overturn his conviction, saying the evidence against him was obtained through warrantless surveillance that violated the Fourth Amendment. The surveillance program in question, sometimes referred to as PRISM, is used by the National Security Agency to gather intelligence on foreign targets. It allows the NSA to gather data from American tech companies under court oversight but without individual warrants. The US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit is now the second appeals court to rule that this form of surveillance is lawful. But it is the first to state that querying the stored data has “important Fourth Amendment implications” — and that doing so should be seen as a separate act from collection that must be “reasonable” under the Constitution.