Feds Drop Bomb on EFF Lawsuit

[xpgeek]

Feds Drop Bomb on EFF Lawsuit

The federal government intends to invoke the rarely used "State Secrets Privilege" -- the legal equivalent of a nuclear bomb -- in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's class action lawsuit against AT&T that alleges the telecom collaborated with the government's secret spying on American citizens.

The State Secrets Privilege is a vestige from English common law that lets the executive branch step into a civil lawsuit and have it dismissed if the case might reveal information that puts national security at risk.

Today's assertion severely darkens the prospects of the EFF's lawsuit, which the organization had hoped would shine light on the extent of the Bush Administration's admitted warrantless spying on Americans.

The government is not admitting, however, that AT&T aided the National Security Agency in spying on American's phone calls and internet communications.

"The fact that the United States will assert the state secrets privilege should not be construed as a confirmation or denial of any of Plaintiffs allegations, either about AT&T or the alleged surveillance activities," the filing reads. "When allegations are made about purported classified government activities or relationships, regardless of whether those allegations are accurate, the existence or non-existence of the activity or relationship is potentially a state secret."

The Justice Department has not formally invoked the privilege yet.

Today's notice was intended to inform Northern California US District Court Judge Vaughn Walker that the government was intending to assert the privilege in order to seek dismissal of the case.

The complete paperwork justifying the government's decision will be filed by May 12.

Souce (http://blog.wired.com/27BStroke6/)

Another story on the subject ...............................

Feds Move to Dismiss Domestic Spying Suit

The Justice Department said Friday it was moving to dismiss a federal lawsuit challenging the Bush administration's secretive domestic wiretapping program.

The lawsuit, brought by the Internet privacy group, Electronic Frontier Foundation, does not include the government.

Instead, it names AT&T, which the San Francisco-based group accuses of colluding with the National Security Agency to make communications on AT&T networks available to the spy agency without warrants.

The government, in a filing here late Friday, said the lawsuit threatens to expose government and military secrets and therefore should be tossed. The administration added that its bid to intervene in the case should not be viewed as a concession that the allegations are true.

As part of its case, the EFF said it obtained documents from a former AT&T technician showing that the NSA is capable of monitoring all communications on AT&T's network, and those documents are under seal. The former technician said the documents detail secret NSA spying rooms and electronic surveillance equipment in AT&T facilities.

Next month, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker will hold a hearing on whether they should be divulged publicly.

President Bush confirmed in December that the NSA has been conducting the surveillance when calls and e-mails, in which at least one party is outside the United States, are thought to involve al-Qaida terrorists.

In congressional hearings earlier this month, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales suggested the president could order the NSA to listen in on purely domestic calls without first obtaining a warrant from a secret court established nearly 30 years ago to consider such issues.

Gonzales said the administration, assuming the conversation related to al-Qaida, would have to determine if the surveillance were crucial to the nation's fight against terrorism, as authorized by Congress following the Sept. 11 attacks.

The EFF lawsuit, alleging AT&T violated U.S. law and its customers' privacy, seeks to stop the surveillance program.

The San Antonio-based telecommunications giant said it follows all applicable laws.

Source (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060429/ap_on_re_us/domestic_spying_lawsuit)

[xpgeek]

This got posted to Digg.com today too, and a worth repeating comment that I thought pretty much sums it up,

So let me get this straight:

The executive branch of the USA government is accused of illegally spying on its own citizens.
To investigate this, somebody sues the private organisation that is alleged to be helping them.
This is supposed to work because the judicial branch and executive branch of the government are separated, so the judicial branch shouldn't be covering for the executive branch.

...and somehow the executive branch can interfere with the judicial branch and simply dismiss cases it doesn't like? I thought the USA government was set up in separate branches to prevent things like this?

Yea, this is total bull****. This is the Bush administration breaking even more freakin laws to keep covered up the ones its already freakin broken.

Freakin country this is turning into. :x:

Anyone else have any thoughts on this?

[Micron]

If we are given the freedom of speech, why enforce old bygone laws to enable "superpowers" to spy and tell us what to do...

Reminds me of William Wallace, You can take my Information... But you'll never take my Freedom (unless you lock me up and throw away the key).

[L-knot]

I will quote an opposing viewpoint to create dialog. Views aren't necessarily my own.

What has been reported today by the New York Times is outrageous. It is false. It is misleading. It is deceitful -- and it is part of an ongoing effort within our country at the highest levels of the Democratic Party and the American media to destroy our ability to wage war against this enemy. I don't know if you've seen it. You probably have heard about it. Here's the headline of the story: "Bush Secretly Lifted Some Limits on Spying in the United States After 9/11, Officials Say." Bush secretly lifted some limits on spying in the United States after 9/11? The story is about how the National Security Agency was secretly told by George W. Bush to go ahead and start spying on domestic Americans as they made international phone calls and sent and received international e-mails. The only problem with the story is that Bush didn't do anything "secretly." There were all kinds of people in on this, including members of Congress and the special secret court that gets involved in these kinds of things.

Had this been written during the Clinton administration, there's some question in my mind whether the story would have been written at all, but had it been, it would have been written in a way as to applaud the Clinton administration. It would have been written this way: "Months after..." "Only months" -- to imply quickness and concern. "Only months after the September 11th attacks, the government secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on potential terror suspects in America." That's how it would have been written, to support the Clinton administration. It wouldn't have said "the Clinton administration," wouldn't have said Bill Clinton personally. It would have said "the government," because the government is good! The government is the be-all-end-all. Government is daddy and mommy and nanny and everybody. The government is Santa Claus. Well, you can't say Santa Claus. They don't like Christmas. So that's how it would have been written, had it been written at all.

FDR, did he protect civil liberties when he rounded up 110,000 Japanese and moved them from their homes and businesses to internment camps? And Lincoln when suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War?

The president had a press conference today, folks, and I think it was one of the president's best public appearances in a long time, because it wasn't scripted, and he was passionate, and he was angry, and the media is a bunch of ignorant fools. Some of the questions he got were laughable. The questions were irrelevant, but they werent really irrelevant because the questions were all about them. The questions were all about their reporting. I think there was one question about Iraq and the vote. It becomes more and more obvious as time goes on that it may as well been (D)Harry Reid asking questions in there. It may as well have been (D)Nancy Pelosi asking questions in there. The mainstream press is jus symbiotic, almost incestuous now this relationship that they have with the Democratic Party.

We don't go to war to protect our civil liberties; we go to war to save our lives. Our civil liberties are worthless if we are dead. If we have all assumed room temperature, folks, our civil liberties don't count diddly-squat.

If it's in the New York Times, put it in the bottom of your bird cage or use it as toilet paper because it probably is not even worth that.

One of the things that I found listening to this press conference and watching it is the sheer ignorance of reporters -- and I'm not talking about stupidity or trying to be insulting. Ignorance: they just don't know. The level of ignorance about the separation of powers, about the Constitution, and about the role of the commander-in-chief is striking to me.

The Democrats are living in an alternative reality dream world. They think they're winning. They're trying to recreate Watergate. They're trying to recreate the Vietnam War. They're McGovernizing themselves time and time and time and time again, and they are going to pay the price down the road, most notably next November will be the first chance.

December 26, 2005
And You Think America Is Repressive?
By Thomas Bray

Spying on e-mail and cell phone traffic without a warrant. Searching offices and residences without a court order. Locking citizens away for weeks or months without filing charges.

Sound like your worst nightmare about the supposedly lawless Bush administration? Perhaps. But I refer to restrictions on civil liberties that are taking place not in the United States but, in the order in which I cited them, Canada, France and Great Britain.

All three countries are cited as moral superiors to the rogue regime in Washington, where the fascist leaders George Bush and Richard Cheney are said to be intent on fastening a reign of terror on the United States. But a brief scan of newspaper websites in those countries – something that the American mainstream media could easily have done before unleashing its own reign of terror on unsuspecting readers -- reveals that their governments have in many cases gone far beyond where the Bush-Cheney could ever dream of going.

The Canadian government has broad authority under anti-terrorism laws to intercept communications without court oversight. And, complained a Toronto Star columnist recently, “the [Canadian] government now has significant new authority to stage secret trials. In some instances, the very fact that the courts are even hearing a case may be kept secret.”

Meanwhile, the government of Jacques Chirac – who seldom loses an opportunity to lecture the United States about its supposedly dreadful policies – has reacted to the recent “intifada” in France by declaring a “state of emergency.” It allows the government to impose a curfew on communities where rioting has taken place, search for and seize evidence with no showing of probable cause, place suspects under house arrest for up to two months and otherwise ride roughshod over normal protections.

In England critics are complaining that the crown jewel of civil rights, the ancient right of habeas corpus, is at risk because of a measure allowing detention without charges for up to 28 days. The government of Tony Blair, no right wing extremist, had initially asked for 90 days. Under the Terrorism Act of 2005, moreover, demonstrations within two miles of Britain’s Parliament are forbidden, severely crimping the equally ancient right of assembly.

Just because other democracies engage in such activity isn’t necessarily a reason the United States should do so. Indeed, if France is doing it, it’s probably a good argument that we shouldn’t. Nor is it a bad thing for The New York Times to call the NSA monitoring to our attention – though one wonders why the Times sat on this supposedly important story for a year, ran it on the eve of a vote to reauthorize the Patriot Act and glossed lightly over substantial court precedent agreeing with President Bush.

As John Schmidt, a former official in the Clinton Justice Department, pointed out in a subsequent Chicago Tribune column, his boss, Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, testified in the 1990s that “the Department of Justice believes, and the case law supports, that the President has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes.” Jimmy Carter had asserted the same power when he was President.

The hysteria over Bush’s use of the National Security Agency to monitor international communications is thus likely to fade as an issue, much as the he-lied-us-into-war hysteria of prior months faded in significance as it became apparent that most of his congressional critics had interpreted the intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in exactly the same fashion as the administration.

How to balance civil liberties and national security is a subject of legitimate dispute. But Americans deserve more perspective on the matter than they are getting from Bush’s critics and their megaphones in the liberal press.

http://realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/co..._26_05_TJB.html


December 26, 2005
The New York Times' Christmas Gift
By Michael Barone

The New York Times' Christmas gift -- sorry, holiday gift -- to the nation's political dialogue was its Dec. 16 story reporting that the National Security Agency has been intercepting telephone conversations between terrorism suspects abroad and U.S. citizens or legal residents in the United States.

What the Times didn't bother telling its readers is that this practice is far from new and is entirely legal. Instead, the unspoken subtext of the story was that this was likely an illegal and certainly a very scary invasion of Americans' rights -

To be sure, federal courts have ruled that the Fourth Amendment's bar of "unreasonable" searches and seizures limits the president's power to intercept communications without obtaining a warrant. But that doesn't apply to foreign intercepts, as the Supreme Court made clear in a 1972 case, writing, "The instant case requires no judgment on the scope of the president's surveillance power with respect to the activities of foreign powers, within or without this country."more: http://realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/com-12_26_05_MB.html

[xpgeek]

Good post L-knot, to continue the discussion I'll argue my personal thoughts on a few points.

First, the quoted first article, just makes me think, honestly, wow come out of the closet already and admit to being a bush loving registered republican.

I quote one thing the first article said :
"We don't go to war to protect our civil liberties; we go to war to save our lives. Our civil liberties are worthless if we are dead."

The writer of this article needs to check his Bush doctrine for updates. We didn't attack Iraq because they were a threat to us, at least not anymore, we attacked them to 'free them and save them and bring them democracy'. Thats the reason now anyway, Bush seems to have conveniently totally forgotten, and I'm sure is happy the American people have too, that according to him, I remember the speeches before the war quite clearly, Bush said Iraq was a grave threat to our way of life, had ties to Bin Laden, and had huge stockpiles of WMD's.

As everyone knows now, this all turned out to be complete bull****, 3 years in Iraq and we have yet to find even a Single WMD, Bush has come out and corrected himself on the Bin Laden ties, now saying Iraq had NO links to 9/11, and now of course our 'reason for being there in the first place' no longer has anything to do with the original reasons.

Bush says, and some Americans believe, that this can all be explained away by 'mis-analyzed intelligence', But I'm sorry to say those people that actually believe that need to do some research into the subject on their own, because no newspaper or news channel has yet to really tell them the whole truth. The fact is, I said fact, this is a proven confirmed fact, that Bush was already discussing possible actions against Iraq BEFORE 9/11 even happened, and was discussing them again the very next day after 9/11.

Bush wanted to invade Iraq, for oil ?, to finish what his daddy started ?, to topple the easiest to topple country in the heart of the middle east he could find to start expanding US influence into the area ?, who knows, but the fact is he conceived a vast web of lies about Iraq to get us in there, and it was all a load of F****n Bull**** !

As for the domestic NSA spying program, Domestic, being the key word there, it is illegal. The NSA and the CIA are free to do whatever the hell they want internationally pretty much, but the charters both of the agencies were created upon specifically prohibit them from operating 'Domestically', that is what the FBI is for, domestic operations. During the cold war whenever the CIA thought they had a Russian spy in the country, it was always the FBI's job to find him and arrest him, because the NSA and the CIA are prohibited from operating domestically.

[L-knot]

She doesn't love Bush and she's not a republican but she believes Kerry would have been a greater disaster. I agree. I'm not a Bush lover either. I am more closely described as a centrist. I do not understand dialog from the very left as it appears to lack logic.

I thought we went to war because Iraq was ruled by a sadistic homicidal dictator.

Regardless of the truth for going to war, I believe Saddam's dictatorship needed to be overthrown and we also need to fight terrorism.

If it's illegal or legal but saved me or a fellow American from another terrorist attack by foiling plans, then it's not as bad as you think it is.

Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of NSA and now deputy national intelligence director, has come forward to say, "This program has been successful in detecting and preventing attacks inside the United States."

The Constitution, Justice Robert Jackson famously wrote, should not be interpreted in a way that makes it "a suicide pact." The notion that terrorists' privacy must be respected when they place a cell-phone call to someone in the United States is in the nature of a suicide pact. The Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches and seizures in the United States should not be stretched into a ban on interceptions of communications from America's enemies abroad authorization to the National Security Agency to carry out electronic surveillance into private phone calls and e-mails is consistent with court decisions and with the positions of the Justice Department under prior presidents."

Has anything changed in your life due to wiretapping? Other than higher gas prices, is there anything that has changed? Personally, I have nothing interesting to say if they listen to my conversations.

Someone was saying at another board about national ID and tracking people, "you'll have some identity theft protections but people always find a way around those (and exploit them), but what you'll lose is far far greater!"

My response:

1. You mean you can't vote 15 times now? or be a voting illegal alien.

2. That would suck for criminals. I'm at home, so track me. I'm going to the bathroom now to take a dump, track me. What exactly will we lose?

The folks i feel sorry for would/are the data processing zombies - my life would bore me to death


NY TIMES 'PUBLIC EDITOR' SLAMS PAPER FOR SILENCE ON LEAK TIMING...

Behind the Eavesdropping Story, a Loud Silence
By BYRON CALAME

THE New York Times's explanation of its decision to report, after what it said was a one-year delay, that the National Security Agency is eavesdropping domestically without court-approved warrants was woefully inadequate. And I have had unusual difficulty getting a better explanation for readers, despite the paper's repeated pledges of greater transparency.

For the first time since I became public editor, the executive editor and the publisher have declined to respond to my requests for information about news-related decision-making. My queries concerned the timing of the exclusive Dec. 16 article about President Bush's secret decision in the months after 9/11 to authorize the warrantless eavesdropping on Americans in the United States.

I e-mailed a list of 28 questions to Bill Keller, the executive editor, on Dec. 19, three days after the article appeared. He promptly declined to respond to them. I then sent the same questions to Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, who also declined to respond. They held out no hope for a fuller explanation in the future.

Despite this stonewalling, my objectives today are to assess the flawed handling of the original explanation of the article's path into print, and to offer a few thoughts on some factors that could have affected the timing of the article. My intention is to do so with special care, because my 40-plus years of newspapering leave me keenly aware that some of the toughest calls an editor can face are involved here - those related to intelligence gathering, election-time investigative articles and protection of sources. On these matters, reasonable disagreements can abound inside the newsroom... Link (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/opinion/01publiceditor.html?ei=5090&en=73506e1ec61c1adb&ex=1293771600&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print)

xpgeek made one edit : Compacted your link into a hyperlink to unwiden the post's width.

[xpgeek]

I'll agree that Saddam was a brutal dictator that needed to be taken down, but, if the US went around the globe taking down brutal dictators, we'd be very very busy.

What about what is happening in Darfur right now, state sponsored genocide, if its the US's job to take down brutal dictators, then why aren't we in Durfur right now ?

I'm not saying taking down Saddam was not a good thing, it was, I will say its a shame that we, obviously, had no clear plan of what to do with the country after we did. Life in Iraq is more dangerous now then it was under the rule of Saddam.

But still, the fact is, taking down Saddam wasn't our reason for going to Iraq. We went to Iraq because they were a threat, because they had WMD's, and ties to 9/11, and all that was a complete lie.

I recommend seeking out a documentary movie titled 'Why We Fight', this movie (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0436971/), call it the work of a leftist liberal if you will, but the information it presents is unquestionable fact, spoken from the mouths of the people themselves, Pentagon intelligence personal who quit in disgust, telling how the pre-war intelligence on Iraq wasn't mis-analyzed, the intelligence was clear, everyone in the Pentagon's intelligence department knew Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, and the intelligence wasn't mis-analyzed, it was completely altered for presentation to the American people.

We went to Iraq in the first place on false reasons, on fabricated intelligence, and on flat out lies.

[L-knot]

Brutal dictator + harboring terrorists and training camps

Found fighter jets buried in sand (http://www.snopes.com/photos/military/sandplanes.asp) - who knows what else is buried - a needle in a haystack. Had time to hide or move WMD's. Now why would they bury fighter jets?"the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

Regarding the war on terrorism: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21364]Because (http://www.bothanspies.com/publicscripts/index.php?

Thanks but I'd rather not view a documentary from a liberal CT - as it most likely pieced together to support its cause much like the statement taken out of context: "it sounded like a missile" - therefore no plane hit the pentagon, it was a missile. Some people still actually believe that, discounting all the eyewitnesses that actually saw the commercial airliner fly over their heads and crash into the pentagon.

Here's some firsthand news from an independent reporter embedded: [url]http://www.bothanspies.com/publicscripts/index.php?http://www.michaelyon-online.com/


Arab-American Psychiatrist Wafa Sultan: There is No Clash of Civilizations but a Clash between the Mentality of the Middle Ages and That of the 21st Century (http://www.memritv.org/Transcript.asp?P1=1050)

As far a Dafur goes:

Both sides have been accused of committing serious human rights violations, including mass killing, looting, and rapes of the civilian population. However, the better-armed Janjaweed quickly gained the upper hand. By the spring of 2004, several thousand people — mostly from the non-Arab population — had been killed and as many as a million more had been driven from their homes, causing a major humanitarian crisis in the region. The crisis took on an international dimension when over 100,000 refugees poured into neighbouring Chad, pursued by Janjaweed militiamen, who clashed with Chadian government forces along the border. More than 70 militiamen and 10 Chadian soldiers were killed in one gun battle in April.


There are no absolute answers to the question of whether we should have invaded Iraq. History will more clearly answer that, and it will judge based largely on the outcome, and that outcome is not clear today even as the fact of the civil war becomes a more accepted premise in our national debate. The reason for this is simple: civil war is not a deterrent to Democracy. In fact, the reverse can be true, a point I made a year ago. Lately, it seems the only part of the debate growing at the same rate as the sectarian attacks is the number of reporters, pundits, politicians and “experts” who are now claiming that Iraq is in civil war. I almost liked it better when I was alone in this, because my only motives were to describe the obvious. more: http://www.michaelyon-online.com/wp/of-words.htm


All in all, I don't know anything. If the world is a chess board and the USA, strategically, moved into Iraq, perhaps it was because there is a larger threat/target to stability and that's Iran. With a chess piece in Iraq, sets the stage for Iran. Life is a chess game it seems.


****edit - here's something. A little about the wiretapping as well: The full picture: http://www.michaelyon-online.com/wp/the-full-picture.htm