CHICAGO — A federal court opened a new hearing Monday after staffers failed last week to record the proceedings in a terrorism case that touches on surveillance issues raised by federal contractor Edward J. Snowden.
At issue before the US Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals is a government request that it reverse a trial court’s ruling granting lawyers for terrorism suspect Adel Daoud unprecedented access to secret court records.
Snowden’s revelations about expanded phone and Internet surveillance by the National Security Agency and how the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court signed off on the program have raised the profile of such issues.
Daoud, a 20-year-old US citizen, has denied allegations that he accepted a phony car bomb from undercover FBI agents in 2012, parked it by a Chicago bar, and pressed a trigger. His trial is set to start Nov. 10.
Daoud’s attorneys have argued that they would face an unreasonable challenge in preparing for trial without the chance to comb through the documentation submitted with wiretap applications to the FISA court.
The defense has said the records could indicate that expanded surveillance methods led investigators to target Daoud.
If so, they could challenge all subsequent evidence on constitutional grounds.
Since Congress created the FISA court in 1978, no defense attorneys had been told they could go through a FISA application until Daoud’s case.