Opinion ID: 4465383
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Inadvertent Collection

Text: The district court's ruling on the suppression motion did not address whether any e-mail accounts of United States persons or individuals within the United States, including Hasbajrami, had been inadvertently targeted, that is, targeted by mistake under the presumption that an address was controlled by a non-United States person. Upon reviewing the classified record, in particular its ex parte proceedings under the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIP A), 18 U.S.C. app. 3, § 1 et seq., it is clear that the district court was made aware of one instance of the direct targeting of an e-mail account controlled by a United States person that resulted in the collection of Hasbajrami's communications. Before the incidental collection discussed above, the NSA had directly targeted at least one such e-mail address. Like the later incidental collection, the NSA had originally been monitoring communications with individuals it reasonably believed were non-United States persons located abroad, and as a result discovered an e-mail from the United States person. At that time, however, NSA analysts concluded, wrongly, that the 64 account holder was not a United States person. The NSA therefore tasked the account (a different account than those that were the subject of incidental collection detailed above) in its own right, and collected communications from the account for several weeks. The agency eventually detasked the account after it concluded it was not yielding significant intelligence information, but it did not initially purge the information because it did not discover until later that the account holder was a United States person. The related Section 702-acquired material, which included communications to and/or from Hasbajrami, stayed in NSA databases, however, and was not disseminated to domestic law enforcement, until the agency conducted a search of these databases in 2014 following the initiation of Hasbajrami's prosecution. The inadvertent collection of communications raises complicated questions. First, as a statutory matter, Section 702 prohibits the targeting of e­ mail accounts that the government knows to be maintained by United States persons. See 50 U.S.C. § 1881a(b). But the statute thus appears to prohibit only knowing or intentional targeting, and not to address situations where the government is mistaken, reasonably or unreasonably. Does the express prohibition of targeting accounts known to be those of United States persons 65 implicitly authorize the targeting of any account not known with certainty to be that of a United States person? If there is evidence of a high likelihood that the account belongs to a United States person and the government proceeds to target it without taking steps to investigate further, does the willful blindness standard, which equates such deliberate indifference to actual knowledge in many legal contexts, apply? Cf. Global-Tech Appliances, Inc. v. SEB S.A., 563 U.S. 754, 766-69 (2011) (discussing willful blindness doctrine). Second1 the Fourth Amendment calculus for such collection would be different than the one employed in considering incidental collection. Incidental collection is justified because the target of the surveillance cannot rely on the Fourth Amendment's protections, as discussed above. But a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident, located in the United States, assuming a reasonable expectation of privacy, would be protected by the Fourth Amendment. Is the Fourth Amendment prohibition of unreasonable searches violated if the government unreasonably (recklessly or negligently) concludes that the targeted account is that of a foreigner located abroad? Is it permissible for the government to adopt a presumption that, under all circumstances or in the presence of one or more key indicia, an account holder whose identity is 66 unclear should be treated as foreign? Would the later discovery that the account did indeed belong to a United States person require the minimization, or the suppression in a criminal case, of inadvertently collected conversations? A district court reviewing a motion to suppress evidence inadvertently collected (or derived from inadvertent collection) would have to address these issues, and perhaps others, in deciding whether the government's reliance on inadvertent collection in an investigation or prosecution was reasonable within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. But we need not decide those questions today because we are satisfied that any inadvertent collection disclosed to the district court was harmless. The interception of communications from the inadvertently targeted account was brief, lasting only approximately two weeks. The materials collected, whatever they were, were not used in applying for the FISA warrant - indeed, their very existence seems to have been unknown to anyone involved in the criminal investigation of Hasbajrami, as the inadvertent targeting of the account in question was not even discovered by th e government until well into the prosecution of this case. And finally, the collection was terminated because the government itself determined that nothing of any intelligence value was being 67 learned. Presumably that conclusion would not have been reached if the collected conversations were indicative of criminal terrorist plots, or were of evidentiary value to a criminal investigation. Thus, even assuming arguendo that there was some legal infirmity in the decision to begin collection despite uncertainty about the status of the account, or to continue it once at least some evidence pointing to a possible United States source for the account was discovered, we conclude, even in the context of a conditional guilty plea, that the failure to suppress the results of that collection was harmless beyond any reasonable doubt.