There's been a lot of focus elsewhere concerning the FISA rulings that were leaked, showing that the government is scooping up the details of pretty much every phone call. However, a case concerning some guys who were trying to rob an armored truck may lead to some interesting revelations related to what the government collects. Daryl Davis, Hasam Williams, Terrance Brown, Toriano Johnson,
and Joseph K. Simmons were charged with trying to rob a bunch of armored Brink's trucks, in which one of the robberies went wrong and a Brink's employee was shot and killed. As part of the case against the group, the DOJ obtained call records. However, during discovery, the government refused to hand over call records for July of 2010, claiming that when they sought them from the telco, the DOJ was told that those records had been purged. Terrance Brown's lawyer is now claiming that since it appears the NSA has sucked up all of this data for quite some time, it would appear that the government should, in fact, already have the phone records from July 2010, which he argues would show that he was nowhere near the robbery when it happened.
Defendant Brown urges that the records are important to his defense because cell-site records
could be used to show that Brown was not in the vicinity of the attempted robbery that allegedly
occurred in July 2010. And, relying on a June 5, 2013, Guardian newspaper article that published
a FISA Court order relating to cellular telephone data collected by Verizon,1 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.