DOJ To Claim National Security in NSA Case 337
deblau writes "Wired is reporting that the federal government intends to invoke the rarely used 'State Secrets Privilege' in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's class action lawsuit against AT&T. The case alleges that the telecom collaborated with the NSA's secret spying on American citizens. The State Secrets Privilege 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."
I think... (Score:5, Insightful)
But if ... (Score:4, Insightful)
If the Executive *did* use ATNT to spy on Americans then its illegal (no warrant) and legal protection doesn't apply to illegal acts.
Try it, the judge will bend over backwards to find a way to continue this case.
Re:I think... (Score:4, Insightful)
legal system beond repair... Time for a reinstall! (Score:4, Insightful)
There is also the constant media consert in fortissimo about how the ends justify the means, i.e. chopping off liberty for the sake of temporary safety and all that jazz. Then there is the issue of seperation of Church and state is slowly but surely being erased. Unfounded wars of aggression (arguable to some extend though I guess) and last but not least, many computer programs are being Censored.
I find it easier to make a list (ala Kill Bill) no only for what needs to be done, but to check to make sure that basic rights are being violated. Lets call this list the constitution.
Here is your assignment for today kids: Go forth unto the internet and find EXTREME cases of governmental violations of each part of the constitution and the bill of rights. Extra points for snappy quotes from goverment officials and spokespeople chanting the party line!
Me thinks it time for a bloody revolution again!
(tickets sold seperately).
Re:I think... (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you really think the federal government has the political capital to spend right now going around and covering up wiretapping that they're NOT doing?
Yep. They do that alright (Score:1, Insightful)
huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:But if ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Damn it, You just bummed me out (Score:3, Insightful)
SHIT there isn't jack shit we can do about it.
Thanks for f'ing up my day
Algerath
executive branch (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems like more than anything else, what has characterized this administration is the desire for power. The wiretaps don't piss me off because I think they are unjust. They piss me off, because wiretaps without any kind of oversight seem likely to be used against the administrations political enemies. The administration has already openly abused its power to try to destroy its such enemies numerous times... they've been hunting down the people that leaked the warantless wiretapping stufff forever (didn't they find one guy?) and will probably try to bring some kind of trumped up charge against their obviously legitimate whistlebloying. Who is to say they weren't tapping democratic campaign headquarters in the 2004 election? I'm not sure that, with the character the administration has itself to have recently, that I can say that is beneath them.
At some point if the power of the executive branch isn't checked, the presidential office itself, could become a threat to the country. With the kind of power that the president has, how difficult would it be to just refuse to step down after your term was up? This president has shown no regard for the law, and a willingness to make up paper thin excuses for his abuse of power. Maybe Bush wouldn't, or couldn't take power like that, but if we set a precedent where we allow the president to break the law, and grab power like crazy all through his administration just like this one did, what's to stop someone more ambitious than him from going further in the future?
I'd like to see congress put some mechanisms in place for checking the execute branch. Specifically, I'd like whatever authority that the administration *imagines* gives them the power to do warantless wiretaps specifically removed. Power to spy on whomever it pleases the administration, without even having to tell anyone in the other branches about it, is clearly a threat to the checks and balance system. Maybe a constitutional amendment needs to be made laying out the powers of the executive branch more specifically, and limiting the power to spy on anyone without oversight from the judicial, and maybe the legislative branch.
Re:Independent examiner (Score:4, Insightful)
Turnabout (Score:3, Insightful)
"But it is in the interest of National Security that I do not perform my legal obligations, and I do not wish to tell you"
Hypocrites - A study in government responsibility.
Yes, but who passes these laws? (Score:2, Insightful)
Even if you elect people who are less abusive of the power I doubt you are going to see any elected officials vote to reduce their own power/influence.
Algerath
Fast-track it. (Score:4, Insightful)
I pledge the fifth... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ok, let's ponder. So it would endanger "national security" if they told that they used ATNT to spy on their own citizens. Now, those citizens are, at least if I got the system in the US right, the ones that elect the ones in power. They are the "nation". So it would endanger their security if they knew whether they've been spied on.
Ignorance is strength... where've I heard that before...
Bingo (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:legal system beond repair... Time for a reinsta (Score:5, Insightful)
This country will be driven to the ground (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I think... (Score:5, Insightful)
1) The trainer said they brought the elephant into your kitchen.
2) There are elephant droppings leading up to your kitchen.
3) The elephant has a huge interest in being in your kitchen.
4) For national security reasons, we will not let you into your kitchen, nor tell you anything about what's happening in your kitchen.
I'd be lead to believe there's a warm cup of coffee in your microwave. Oh no, it would indicate that there's an elephant in your kitchen.
Rarely used? (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps it should be called the CYA privilege.
put PGP everywhere (Score:3, Insightful)
Good programs would be:
- encrypted storage for torrent files (F*** off RIAA)
- Generate and upload GPG key when you install Thunderbird by default
- Encryption for VoIP (yeah, Skype has it and it pisses of the feds)
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/04/voi
or zfone http://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/zfone/index.html [philzimmermann.com]
- GPG encryption in HTTP traffic (no more snooping on forms)
-
Possible Justification (Score:1, Insightful)
Suppose that AT&T has been cooperating w/ NSA, this wouldn't take a great stretch of anyone's imagination. Now suppose NSA is using that access to get information on foreign diplomats and intelligence officers in the US (legally allowed) and data transiting the US or used by Al Qaeda people outside the US, such as Hotmail or GMail accounts. They could have a list of known overseas email accounts, and just watch the SMTP headers and grab them as they come by, or watch for the logins to suspecte accounts, they could even monitor the IP addresses on that SMTP or HTTP transfer to insure the email was in fact being retreived from overseas. The servers are here, but all the communications are between people outside the US, and the pipelines are an easy way to access it all, instead of having to monitor a bunch of dial-up, DSL, and DirecWay connections in the Middle East and Europe.
In this scenario, nothing illegal is going on, but for AT&T to defend itself, it would have to admit to cooperating w/ NSA, and would have to explain what traffic is being monitored, so as to prove it isn't helping monitor Americans, at least willingly or knowingly. That would definitely cause some of the bad guys to stop using US based servers, so we might lose valuable intelligence.
Who knows, but that could be a large part of it, and in that case I would have to agree w/ DoJ 100% on quashing the lawsuit.
Re:I think... (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not a court of law, but I'm sufficiently convinced that the government's done something fishy (again) and gotten caught at it (again).
Doug
Sounds like they're not denying it -- why?? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's exactly what people are suggesting it is, and the government is going to cover its ass with a big "state secret" stamp?
What is this? The frickin USSR?
Here's a clue: if the system had been set up via legislation, so that there was debate about its merits and it had some kind of legal legitimacy, it wouldn't be a big deal to keep the details of its implementation secret. But secretly set up something that sure sounds as if it must be violating well-established law, and of course people are going to be pissed off and demand answers to questions. They are asking now for answers and justification that should have been provided before the thing was deployed.
At least the Great Firewall of China is openly admitted to exist, and everybody already knows the government there is authoritarian. Does a Great Firewall of the USA exist? The world may never know. But if its existence and justification is not properly explained to its own people it will say much more about the current US regime than the answers to the legal questions in this case ever would.
In what kind of bizarro democracy would the government truly be better off not explaining itself? Shouldn't they dispell people's concerns about these rumors?
Re:Independent examiner (Score:5, Insightful)
Words are one thing. Actions are another.
Re:I think... (Score:2, Insightful)
If you don't think this matters, take the recent article about the Madrid bombings. The Bombers knew that their email would be read if they sent it from Hotmail or from Yahoo mail. So they shared a email account between them, shared the password, and hence never hit any of Europe's security flags.
Please don't treat this stuff as if it were all one dimensional and simple. This is a complex issue, and a knee jerk reaction just proved how incapable people are of thinking through the issues.
Re:I think... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not the problem. The NSA was built to spy on people who need spying on. The problem is, they, and the administration, are not following the laws set forthe to do so such spying (getting warrants, even after the fact). THAT is the problem here. They are breaking the law because they feel like it, and they believe they do not have to be accountable for doing so,
Re:I still don't see how state secrets applies (Score:3, Insightful)
No, that's what the administration is claiming. The truth is, no one knows for sure and the administration is doing its damndest to make sure no one will. That sure makes me feel more secure!
Re:But if ... (Score:3, Insightful)
How far has our country fallen from those lofty goals set out by our founding fathers, who believed it was the RIGHT of a person to overthrow a government which took away his basic rights. Today, it's illegal to even suggest the president deserves to be killed for the murders, lies, and corruption he has brought to the American people. Land of the free my ass.
Re:I think... (Score:4, Insightful)
Did it ever cross yours that it should do it in the manner proscribed by the fourth amendment, which has worked great for the past 220 years?
"liberals hate the word 'Constitution' because they know that if the American public were to actually read and understand the Constitution, the liberal platform would literally crumble into dust."
Gosh, literally? I think you've been hitting that peace pipe a little yourself, hippie.
Re:EFF Loss = New Precedents against our Civil Rig (Score:5, Insightful)
Either they go ahead with the prosecution and risk creating this precedent that you fear. Or, they do not, and the government gets away with it.
Either way, with no consequences to their actions, the government is (or might as well be) above the law. At least with the EFF trying to prosecute, they
a) have a chance of doing something about it
b) bring it to people's attention
c) in the event of losing, sow the seed in people's minds that they *must* have been up to something in order to quash the case like that
Incidentally, you also mustn't forget that precedent is a guide, not an iron clad rule. Judges are free to rule differently; precedent just gives them something to use as guidance, and to point at in the event of their ruling being questioned.
Re:EFF Loss = New Precedents against our Civil Rig (Score:5, Insightful)
The EFF case is entirely different. The government claims that Executive Privilege is a higher power than the 4th Amendment in the Bill of Rights. And the EFF, in the process of losing their lawsuit, will permanently erode the 4th Amendment, and place the Executive Branch beyond the reach of the courts.
Re:I think... (Score:3, Insightful)
Please don't treat this stuff as if it were all one dimensional and simple. This is a complex issue, and a knee jerk reaction just proved how incapable people are of thinking through the issues.
You see, there are a few problems here:
Any policy has to be executed to achieve anything, which means there are always a bunch of people involved. Any organisation that already cares shit about the legality of what they are doing, would have little problem obtaining information on such policies by means of infiltration bribary etc. Keeping any large scale policy really secret is practically impossible.
No matter how complex and advanced your policy, getting around it is usually a matter of spotting a flaw and having a simple means to exploit that flaw, as per your example of the Madrid bombers.
Combine those two things and you find that secrecy does not help preventing terrorist attacks, but does prevent normal civilians from knowing what is up and having a founded opinion.
Re:I still don't see how state secrets applies (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you sure about that? The way I read the EFF case and the and the Wired writeup [wired.com], they are under the belief that ALL communications are being re-routed to the NSA. Not simply all calls which are going international.
If they are truly getting copies of every single AT&T communications, this would most especially NOT be limited to international communications -- it would, in fact, be large-scale domestic spying with no warrants or specific targets. Merely recording everything that goes on to see if they can sift out anything useful.
That is bloody scary! And, highly illegal.
Principles of freedom (Score:5, Insightful)
Patriotism is standing up for liberty. Patriotism is battling against tyranny, even if that tyranny is home-grown. Patriotism is putting the rights of the people before the rights of the government, and before the rights of corporations.
Re:But if ... (Score:2, Insightful)
If you are saying that the major opposing candidate at the last US presidential election was completely indistinguishable from Bush, and would have acted exactly the same in the circumstances that followed that election, then you are wrong. That idea appears to please quite a number of would-be anti-system people around here, but it is a childish excuse for not paying attention to detail.
You had a choice (and, moreover, you already knew Bush from a previous term!)
Agreed and furthermore (Score:4, Insightful)
This is part of a larger pattern, unfortunately. In defending this program, AG Gonzalez has stated that the AUMF of 2001 allows such a program because, in its words, it allows the president to take action against all "states, persons, or organizations that he determines" were involved in the 2001 attacks. Such an interpretation would essentially mean the official end of the American republic and the rise of an imperial military dictatorship. At the risk of invoking Godwin's law, this is not fundamentally different to *how* the Nazis took power after the Reichstag was burned. Our system is designed to protect against this exact danger.
The problem is not the spying per se. It is instead the way the program is run without adequate safeguards to the system of government of our democratic republic. I certainly hope that the court in this case does not give the Executive a free pass in this area. Allowing the State Secrets privilege to be invoked as a way to quash judicial oversight of such a program would be such a free pass.
All most of us are asking is for judicial oversight.
Re:I think... (Score:4, Insightful)
If this were not a crime against the *people* of the US, I would not have a problem with this defense. But since it is, I think it is an issue that goes to the heart of *why* we even bother with a Constitution...
Re:I think... (Score:5, Insightful)
I won't belabor this point. The other replies have you nailed to the wall here. The issue is that if the government should be spying on certain people then the government damn well must do so within the confines established by the constitution and withing the the law. This administration has no respect for the constitution and beleives it is above the law, and the current story is about efforts to block the corts from looking at whether the current spying is being done within the law or being done illegally.
No, of course not, because people like you immediately think that everybody in the world is going to get along if we all smoke the peace pipe together.
Pardon me, but bullshit.
That is nothing but your own bias and imagination. Nothing but you setting up a straw man and pretending that your opponent is some demon that he is NOT.
I will lay strong odds that the person you are reffering to supported the war in Afghanistan, and I defy you to identify any meaningful percentage of "people like him" who opposed the war in Afghanistan.
Someone who (for example) opposes the war in Iraq and who absolutely despises the current administration, that person is NOT some anti-war coward anti-american hippy peacenik if they were also "pro-war" on Afghanistan.
And you automatically assume that the government is evil
Heay, that not too far off from the position of the Founding Fathers and teh very basis of our Constitution. That basis being that the government is made up of humans, and that humans are sometimes wrong or currupt, and that even good people sometimes abuse power and do Bad Things even with the best of intent, and that no branch of government should be trusted! That every branch of government and every peice of power withing the government must be subject to checks and balances and review by other parts of government. And this very case is about the judicial branch exercising it's Constitutional Power to review the legality of actions by the executive branch, and the executive branch desiring to exercize it's power independantly and without checks and without balances and without review. It's about the executive branch saying "Trust Us", we are doing Something Good, and we shouldn't have any pesky checks and balances looking over our shoulders making sure that we respect the Constitution and that we obey the law.
I'm sorry, but NO. The very basis of the Constitution is that no part of government should be trusted to police itself. The single most important time NOT to trust some part of government is when they make the very claim "Trust Us" and attempt to evade review.
and that conservatives eat little African babies for a snack before dinner.
Oooo! How recursive! A strawman of a straw man!
Come on, there is no vast neo-con conspiracy going on.
Well, I don't know exactly how "vast" it is, and maybe "conspiracy" is a bit grandiose, but many of the top positions of government are in fact held by self-professed neo-con,s and those self-professed neo-cons do self admittedly work and plan (aka 'conspire') with each other in furtherance of neo-con goals and policies.
So while you might quibble that the language was loaded, you cannot dispute the fact that there is a very distinct group with a distinct non-mainstream philosophy working and planing with each other ('conspiring') for that distinct agenda.
And don't even pretend to equate neo-con and conservative. There are a very large number conservatives becoming increasingly vocal of increasingly vocal in distancing "True Conservatives" from the policies and agenda of "Neo-Con".
The current administration has an approval rating of 32%. You don't hit an abysmal number like 32% without seriously screwing up and pissing off a substantion percentage of even your own party loyalists. Ev
Re:I think... (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm not an American, but I've lived in multiple countries before, and am a citizen of two.
I've never voted in an election and halfway (or even less) through the term did not feel outraged and ripped off. At that point you decide you may have made a mistake, so you vote for the other guy. Once that happens you feel the same way.
No, the issue here is the whole system is broken.
Politicians should not be allowed in any way to receive money from companies. Companies as entities should not be allowed in any way to have political opinions or to back any political movement or organization. Politicians who lie about anything, and do I mean anything (like.. campaign promises, "Oh, no, we didn't take that money"), should be immediately dismissed from office, thrown in jail for a minimum for a few years, max life.
It may seem harsh, but I think it's the only way we're going to see some type of change.
Political office should in no way should look appealing. It shouldn't be seen as what every rich person wants to do, indeed what everyone wants to do; "Oh mommy, I want to be president when I grow up"
No, it should be seen as a burden, and as a grave risk. Only those who are brave enough, and think they can do a good enough job should have any incentive to do so. I think the above plan will make that a reality.
Past this point you need to reform voting practices. How most voting systems in the world today work is ridiculously bad.