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UK terror case: NSA intercepts had warrants
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US National Security Agency surveillance of email played a key role in the investigation and conviction this week in the United Kingdom of three men who planned to bomb airliners using liquid explosives, and that electronic surveillance was authorized by warrants, reported Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald. Emails that were entered into evidence in the UK trial were obtained via a process even more stringent than in the US, proving that due process and judicial checks on executive power do not make counterterrorism prosecutions burdensome or impossible.
The United States and the United Kingdom share sensitive intelligence information, including intercepts and surveillance, under the auspices of a "special relationship" dating back to World War II.
New York Times' online coverage of NSA's role in the UK conviction at first painted the news as vindication of Bush administration efforts to circumvent the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and constitutional limits on eavesdropping on Americans by mischaracterizing opponents of illegal and unsupervised electronic surveillance as opponents of any kind of electronic surveillance of terrorists. The Times later amended its online 'The Lede' column, but Times writer Robert Mackey originally posted this question to readers:
Given the continuing controversy in the United States over N.S.A. surveillance when it involves U.S. citizens, do readers who oppose letting the authorities read the private e-mail correspondence of Americans feel any differently about the issue knowing that the agency’s monitoring of these foreign nationals may have helped disrupt a major plot in this case?
However, the facts of the UK liquid bombing case do not support the claim that counterterrorism operations are hampered by court and procedural restrictions on electronic surveillance. And as Greenwald points out, few, if any Americans oppose surveillance of terrorist suspects--but many Americans do oppose unjustified, wasteful surveillance of Americans who are not terrorists.
Instead, the case shows that terrorism convictions that stick are the result of adherence to established criminal procedure and a focus on actual terrorist targets.
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