Telecoms Facing $50 Billion Lawsuit for Wiretaps 585
hdtv writes "According to a MarketWatch article, BellSouth Corp and Verizon Telecommunications are facing lawsuits seeking billions of dollars in damages for the decision to turn over calling records to the government. The damages amount to $1,000 per person, whose records were turned over to Feds. According to the article, 'consumers could sue the phone service providers under communications privacy legislation that dates back to the 1930s. Relevant laws include the Communications Act, first passed in 1934, and a variety of provisions of the Electronic Communications and Privacy Act, including the Stored Communications Act, passed in 1986.'"
Here's what I did... (Score:5, Informative)
Second, I'm cancelling my phone service w/AT&T and I will let them know exactly why. I'm switching to an Internet phone. Now, I know that this may not be much safer, especially considering any call INTO a bad phone company would be logged and reported to the NSA. (This is why Qwest customers aren't safe if they call anyone who uses AT&T, for example)... but if enough people cancel in disgust, who knows, maybe they'll get the message.
Third, I'm donating to the EFF [eff.org]. They need our help more than ever. And vice-versa.
Fourth, I'm ready, willing, and able to join any class action lawsuits against these companies. Even if they get thrown out [slashdot.org].
Fifth, not an email. Not a letter. But a phone call to my state Senators and Representative.
Also #1: Has anyone put together a unified wiki/forum trying to "reverse-engineer" the NSA's data mining program from published reports + what IT folks & mathematicians think is possible? I bet with enough collaboration and discussion, the net can figure out pretty close to what they're doing with this massive database/total information awareness program (sounds a bit like they're creating associations between clusters of people, much like Amazon does when they profile you to recommend new products... The more info they have, the more they can cross-reference, looking for patterns and comparing with patterns of known profiles (criminals, political enemies, etc.).. I'd be really interested in learning more about what people think this program is and how it might work, from a technological point of view.
Also #2: Merry Fitzmas [truthout.org]
Read This. (Score:2, Informative)
Or are facts and precedent too "paranoid" for you?
Qwest will Slay the Dragon of Tyranny! (Score:3, Informative)
In a recent news article [latimes.com], the "Los Angeles Times" reports, " USA Today, which disclosed the program this week, reported that Qwest had refused to turn over its phone records because it believed it would be illegal. Qwest urged the NSA to get a court order, but the agency refused, the newspaper reported.
In a statement Friday, the attorney for former Qwest Chief Executive Joseph Nacchio said the government approached the company in the fall of 2001 seeking access to the phone records of Qwest customers, with neither a warrant nor approval from a special court established to handle surveillance matters.
'Mr. Nacchio concluded that these requests violated the privacy requirements of the Telecommunications Act,' attorney Herbert J. Stern said. "
I encourage everyone to support Qwest by making it their preferred telecommunications provider.
Interestingly, AT&T is one of the companies that eagerly gave the customers' telephone records to the government. AT&T is also affiliated with Yahoo DSL via AT&T's merger with Pacific Bell. No one should be surprised at the connection between AT&T and Yahoo. Yahoo is the company that assisted Beijing in arresting and imprisoning several reporters in China [rsf.org].
I encourage everyone to use Qwest as the preferred telecommunications provider and to use either MSN or Google as the preferred search engine. Use your economic might to defeat tyranny.
Disclaimers (Score:2, Informative)
Five years ago, I worked in the Civil Service and despite being a goverment department, we had to inform our callers that their calls might be recorded.
If I understand things correctly, we could've been sued, had we not had those warnings.
If the UK has rules and regulations about these things, I'm hardly surprised that the US has similar; so who is going to be the first to actually make a case of this?
Re:Buckle Up (Score:4, Informative)
>"You're deluded, dude. You must have missed the slashdot article a few days ago about >the polling results that show 63% of Americans support the NSA operations."
You are referring to the Washington Posts slanted "snap poll" of only 500 respondents.
Newseeek has conducted a larger poll since with proper methodology and has found:
41% say necessary tool, 53% say goes too far.
Atrios link [blogspot.com]
In any case, the extent of the violation of my privacy and my rights guaranteed by the constitution are not measured by counting snouts.
Martial Law? (Score:3, Informative)
dont believe the govt stats (Score:3, Informative)
Shadow Govt statistics
Re:Until the government says "National Security" (Score:3, Informative)
Heh. Good luck getting the NSA to testify to that.
I suspect this suit has legs. A company like Qwest does not tell the gov't to shove off lightly so you've got to figure that they saw this suit coming and decided that they couldn't win it. If the NSA decides to help the telcos (with the Administration's record, there's no reason to think that they will) they can do so by fessing up (not bloody likely) or trying to suppress all the evidence in the name of National Security. Since this is a civil suit, that plus the bits that do leak through should be sufficient to indicate that it happened and that the parties concerned had reasons to doubt the legality.
Re:Buckle Up (Score:3, Informative)
That's a dangerously careless attitude. To illustrate why, I refer you to everend Martin Niemoller's famous poem: [andrejkoymasky.com]
Re:Why fret over privacy loss? (Score:4, Informative)
First, we go to USPS and file a change of address form [usps.com]. We need to do this quickly and it probably should span the next three or four months. That should give us bank account information--bank statements and the like. We can then contact the bank and arrange a wire-transfer to a bank account in the Caymans. Hope you weren't saving money for college.
Re:Thank you, Sheyenne. (Score:1, Informative)
The great thing about the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.
Dear Stupid (Score:2, Informative)
Not Wiretaps (Score:2, Informative)
The incidents involved are not wiretaps. The demagogues always have their day, but at least on /. let's keep the facts straight.
Re:Until the government says "National Security" (Score:4, Informative)
I would like to make clear that this effort had nothing to do with national security. What is more it has only one obvious conclusion for its objective. That I will let the readers figure out as they read what is the truth about what is going on. Please understand, I have read the requests for proposals and looked at bidding on the contracts to provide the service that now serves the NSA and the CIA and several US DOD operations. I know exactly what I am talking about here. This is not a supposition.
The programs involved were not simply limited to acquiring the phone numbers dialed and times of calls etc like portrayed. The data was collected under the direction of Admiral Poindexter who was removed but the contracts and work continued. The program was to provide Total Information Awareness. [epic.org]
The level of information mined includes 100% of all commercial database data that could be obtained. This was not necessarily limited to the amount of data "Legally" obtainable. It included software engines to recognize speach, pictures and to even identify where a picture was taken, when and what angles etc. It was not limited to metadata either. The engines would generate contextual metadata on their own. The intent was to be able to listen electronically to 100% of all world wide phone, fax and internet traffic with full understanding and full cross reference of data. The computer networks and engines to do this are very big and do exist. The US Government under this routinely intercepts a large amount of data and has search engine skill applied to the output.
My company would not bid on the contracts even though we would do some things because some of us in the company were not invertebrates. We could see that this had no purpose regards the military GWAT (Global War On Terror). It was a level of spying and information gathering that clearly had no innocent purpose.We had other contracts which were also out of Admiral Poindexters office.
It is clear that Al Qaeda etc had nothing to fear from such a system. Their hand carried and simple word swap encryption (Private Codes) work well against such an engine. Bojinka [the7thfire.com] for example would have had no meaning until an arrest was made.
The value of data to coerse a Congressman or a citizen or to produce "faked up" arrest data would be endless. The value to compromise the integrity of any democratic process and produce extortion is endless as well. (Please use your brain here: Ask why would a government want to do this? Ask what would they do this for?)
Rest assured that recording of your phone numbers and who you called is not even significant to this operation. The level of it is deeper and more complete information on every living person on the planet than has been collected by the secret police of any terroristic evil regieme in history. The level of data here is beyond the wildest dreams of the NAZI SS in their worst days. Do what you will with this information. You now know the level of the data collection. You know know a lot. What we are facing is a situation I described to my nephew one day regards girls. I told him to never do by the dark of night, that which he didn't expect to see on a webcam, because it probably is on a webcam! You have no privacy. The issue is what you do and how you react to it.
Remember that a dishonest political prosecutor or dishonest official might well take custody of this data some day. It will all be there just waiting for his use.
Re:An intelligent judge (Score:3, Informative)
I'd say that the amount of terror US gets is disproportionally small to the amount of terror US applies to some countries in the rest of the world.
Site please. I'd say your wrong.
Plenty of citations can be had by just looking at Latin America. The history of U.S. involvement in these countries is awful, the fact that the U.S. has tore down democracies in various Latin American countries and replaced their governments with dictators is mind boggling. Isn't the U.S. supposed to support democracy?
Take the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua during the late '60s and early '70s. Somoza was supported by the U.S. with supplies, training for his contra troops, etc. Somoza was a brutal dictator even worse than Noriega (Who the U.S. saw fit to capture by invading Panama so that some control would be retained by the U.S. in that country.)
Then there is also the military aid supplied to El Salvador during the 1980's. Archbishop Oscar Romero [wikipedia.org] sent a letter of plea to president Carter to not send more military aid to El Salvador because the aid would enable the government to continue oppressing the population. Aid was sent and Romero soon assassinated. Why would the U.S. send military aid to a country in such a case?
There are many reasons that different groups and countries hate the U.S., and it isn't because of our "freedom".
Re:Seems the wrong reaction (Score:3, Informative)
If there's another "terrorist act", and the gubmit uses it to try for more inappropriate powers, shouldn't we view it instead that they're simply incompentent with their current powers?
You're assuming that the Congress will act rationally, instead of being drunk on the potent cocktail of fear and outrage that enabled Cheny to ram Patriot Act I and II through post 9/11.
Dubya & Company, however, have shown themselves to be masters of using terror and misguided patriotism to advance their agenda.
<GODWIN ALERT>
When Hitler wanted more power, but the rest of the government refused to acquiesce, he engineered the Reichstag Fire [wikipedia.org]. After blaming the fire on the 'Communists', and trotting out Marinus van der Lubbe to substantiate the claim, the German Government was all too happy to activate the Enabling Act [wikipedia.org], giving Hitler the power to pass laws by mere decree.
Now make the following substitutions in the above text:
Hitler's estate ought to sue for plagarism.
Re:Until the government says "National Security" (Score:2, Informative)
calm down there, Tex.
you dont need a "dishonest political prosecutor or dishonest official" to grab the info from the NSA.
You only need someone with enough cash to buy all that info. 2702(c)(6) of the US Code: phone records may be freely disclosed, at the company's discretion "(6) to any person other than a governmental entity."
that's right.
By law, with enough cash, I could personally buy all that phone call info, and donate it to the NSA.
So stop all the crying crap about your "lost privacy.
-john