Pandora’s Box: Lawyers seeking NSA data in murder case

A Florida man wants the NSA to hand over his phone records to prove his innocence.

In an unexpected twist of the secretive NSA phone-tapping scandal, the lawyer of a Florida man currently on trail for the murder of a Brinks security truck driver in 2010 now wants the NSA to produce cell phone location records of his client in order to prove his innocence.

NBC News reports that:

“Relying on a June 5, 2013, Guardian newspaper article … Defendant Brown now suggests that the Government likely actually does possess the metadata relating to telephone calls made in July 2010 from the two numbers attributed to Defendant Brown,” wrote U.S. District Judge Robin Rosenbaum in an order demanding that the federal government respond to the request on June 10.

But federal prosecutors said they can’t respond to such request because the government does not have that data.

And now that the box has been opened, there’s no doubt that more and more lawyers will continue to ask the NSA over data they suspect might help them in solving court cases.

Dan Solove, a George Washington University privacy law expert had this to say:

“This is a little bit of an awakening to the government, that you can’t hold massive amounts of personal data with impunity,” he said. “Once you do, a lot of obligations and responsibilities kick in. One of the consequences of keeping data is that now you open yourself up to discovery.”

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