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U.S. Government Intervenes in EFF vs. AT&T
An anonymous reader writes "Reuters is reporting that the US government has 'filed a motion on Saturday to intervene and seek dismissal of a lawsuit by a civil liberties group against AT&T Inc. over a federal program to monitor U.S. communications.' More from the article: " In its motion seeking intervention, posted on the court's Web site, the government said the interests of the parties in the lawsuit "may well be in the disclosure of state secrets" in their effort to present their claims or defenses ... A hearing is scheduled for June 21 before federal Judge Vaughn Walker." You may recall a few weeks ago when the DOJ asked the judge to dismiss the case. They've now taken the next step required to quash this legal action.
Last I checked there were three suits pending on this exact issue, and the EFF suit was just one of them. Surely the executive can't brush off all of them.
Anyway I doubt they'll get their motion. While congressmen can be bought off and Supreme Court justices can be replaced, I see no reason why a normal civil court judge would roll over and abdicate his authority just because the executive branch is whining that they don't want oversight by other branches of government.
Only a dictatorship would take steps to prevent anyone from knowing if their rights were being violated.
If Mr. Bush is so sure of his assertion that nobody's rights are being trampled and that all of his Executive Orders approving these actions are legal, then he shouldn't be afraid for these actions to face the rule of law.
But then, the administration knows full well that none of this will stand up to a legal challenge.
You are witnessing the actions of a dictatorial administration consumed with the belief in its own superiority and its own place above the law. Bush believes that as President, he can do anything he wants without regard to the law; he believes himself to be invinceable.
Unfortunately, as Congress and the courts stand now, he's right.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
The "in Soviet Russia" jokes have become obsolete. They're simply not funny anymore. "In Soviet Russia, the government monitors you", "In Soviet Russia, the products dictate the market", and so on.
The whole fun of twisting subject and object in a sentence around and placing "in Soviet Russia" in front of it is simply not funny anymore. It's true. It's where we're heading. Communism won. Slightly differently than we feared, but the result is the same.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Because the US is attacking Iran in the next one to five months - before the fall elections.
Two aircraft carriers are moving through the Pacific to join a third already in the Gulf as we speak.
The US is running Kurdish and Iranian dissident groups on incursions into Iran, to stimulate Iranian incursions into Iraq. The Turks are severely upset, having massed 250,000 troops on the Turkey side of the Iraq border.
Once the Iran war launches, it will "bomb" all other concerns off the front pages - including the Republican bribery scandals, the CIA agent leaking, the wreck of the US intelligence services by Bush, etc., ad nauseum.
The end result of the attacks on Iran will be a ten-year guerrilla war two to four times as big and damaging to the US as Vietnam.
By this time in 2008, even Karl Rove will be demanding Bush's impeachment - oh, wait, Karl's being indicted this week (he told the President so last week and AG Gonzales went into the courthouse Friday to hear the indictment.)
So forget the spying on US citizens.
By the way, the Narus company that builds the hardware referenced in the EFF case is run by an "Israeli immigrant" (read: Mossad) - and one of the the directors is a former NSA guy.
Anything more you want to know?
Better learn to welcome your new Bush overlord...cause he already knows if you don't approve.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Bush is nominating Hayden to direct the CIA. Even though Hayden broke the law by spying on us, saying the 4th Amendment doesn't require probable cause. It does.
So Bush's government is derailing justice to protect his compiling vast complex databases of our private communications. In the hands of Iran/Contra conspirators.
After Bush's Justice Department agreed to drop their in-house investigation into Bush's NSA wiretap spying because Bush's NSA told them they didn't have security clearance, these lawsuits are the main obstacle to Bush spying on you as much as he can, taxpaid by you.
Next week, NSA whistleblower Chris Strom will reveal to the Senate how the NSA domestic spying goes even further than these latest exposures (despite Bush denial at every step). Probably spying on us with our satellites, which they scare us into paying for as part of that useless $BILLION Star Wars missile shield.
Feel safer?
--
make install -not war
We don't know that the NSA was telling anyone at AT&T what it was doing or how it was going to use the information. It could be that the case filed requests information from the NSA that the NSA never shared with AT&T in the first place. Even if the NSA only told a few AT&T executives, that's still better than having *everyone* know in public court documents.
However, can't court records be sealed for cases like this?
"Just highlights the fact that the fight for freedom never ends. the CIA would act like the KGB if they could. Same with any other government entity."
FYI, this case regards the NSA, not the CIA. I still think that the culture of the agency plays a large role as far as how much power it abuses. Rendition flights aside, I think the CIA still has a culture that supports our basic rights as Americans (they just had a very amoral view of accomplishing our goals overseas). Word is inside the agency, they are *extremely* unhappy with Bush's blaming the CIA for 9/11 when they did everything in their power to warn the president, and they are unhappy with Bush's political appointees who are now embroiled in scandal.
The security agencies are not filled with party loyalists like they were in Stalin's USSR or Hussein's Iraq. They are staffed by people who read 1984 and took the same civics class that you and I have. It would take a while, perhaps a generation or so, to overturn the culture and populate the agency with loyalists. If the Bush administration tried to do anything really serious in the near future, they would face tremendous backlash.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
There are other ways to ensure the political compliance of the intelligence community. It's funny you should mention the CIA; in the wake of Porter Goss's resignation, Sidney Blumenthal wrote a piece for Spiegel Online that can be found at http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,15 18,415638,00.html which discussed the recent history of the agency. Rather than stacking it with loyalists, the current administration is attempting to gut the CIA and transfer the lion's share of its duties to the Pentagon. The current culture of the U.S. armed forces is much more amenable to the administration's agenda than CIA could ever be, and whatever civics training that its personnel have matters little in face of their adherence to the chain of command.
In reality, the administration has very nearly accomplished the objective you allude to, i.e. the elimination of whatever respect for the rights of Americans that the intelligence community still has. They have simply been more clever about it. The Spiegel article makes clear that these actions are very serious; I can only hope that the backlash you speak of will actually become manifest.
These are extremely ominous developments. What is worrisome is not merely that the executive branch is engaging in these illegal and unconstitutional activities, but that it is so brazenly asserting a right to do so. In past administrations, e.g. Nixon's, great efforts were made to keep activities like this a secret. Nixon understood that it was unconstitutional for the "Plumbers" to break into Daniel Elsberg's psychiatrist's office or to tap the phones of the Democratic National Committee. He did not want these activities disclosed because he knew they would not be tolerated by his political opponents or even by his political allies. In comparison to Nixon's administration, Bush's efforts at secrecy are relatively lackluster. Indeed, whenever they are faced with a disclosure of one of these kinds of activities - torture, holding people without charge, circumventing the Geneva convention, spying on innocent civilians without a warrant, etc, - they assert that these activities are perfectly justified.
In a strange way, Nixon's attempt to cover-up his administration's illegal activities involved an implicit acknowledgment of the rule of the law - he engaged in a cover-up because he knew what he had done was illegal. Bush and company don't try very hard to cover up their illegal activities, because they don't care to understand that what they have done violates the Constitution.
As the logic of this plays out, it is going to become apparent that *there must be a constitutional crisis* if we do not want to see the Fourth Amendment eviscerated. If the executive asserts powers it should not have, then either the legislative or the judicial branch, or the people directly, will have to bring the system back into balance. Otherwise we face a slide into tyranny. We cannot allow Bush's justifications of these unconstitutional acts to stand, because they provide precedents that are too threatening to our fundamental liberties. A constitutional crisis is inevitable - and essential - for the health of our democracy.
Since the program will waste investigative resources it will *harm* national security. No, I do not see good and legitimate reasons to hurt my country's safety.
/. for daring to question the mindthink
>taste the wrath of
Yes, there is a lot of "mindthink" on Slashdot. Most of us think with our minds. There are exceptions.
And if true, any reference to 911 in justifying these measures must be a lie.
Cite?
It's hard to come up with reputable testimony about what are secret programs.
But note that the NSA has been around since 1981. The size of its budget is secret, but it is known to be larger than the CIA's budget since at least the mid-1990s. It employs at least a few thousand mathematicians and computer scientists. The electricity bill for its headquarters is several million dollars a year -- considerably larger than one would expect for a building of its size. [link]
Just what has it been doing in all that time? It's a secret. There are no credible, verifiable resources that can explain. If you insist on asking for a "cite" then no one can give you any.
But I think it's not such a tremendous leap to suppose that they have been spying on electronic communications on an unprecedented scale. What else could they possibly have been up to for the last 25 years? And if they haven't been spying, then have they just been pissing away a few hundred billion dollars on nothing??
I'm not passing judgment on R.v.W. or anything else. All I'm saying is that, by making a litmus test of that ruling, politics have forced justices into a commitment of absolute obedience to precedent. By their public admission that "No matter what I, personally, believe, I will honor precedent," justices are forced to honor all retarded rulings previously made rather than giving them the flexibility to adapt to the changes of the world.
I have no answers. This is really one of those "worst form of government, except all the others" kinds of situation. We have to honor precedent, or we fall into anarchy; but we have to disregard bad precedent, only who knows what decisions we're making today that are bad? (Okay, we all have opinions, but a century fom now at least half of them will be demonstrably moronic.)
By the way, I found your earlier post very well-thought out, though not entirely convincing. (That's newspeak for "mod parent insightful.")
There are a number of reasons why people aren't talking impeachment, these days, but the most obvious one is: "President Cheney"
I suspect I know the answer to this already, but I'll ask it anyhow, just in case a legal person can respond and we'll learn something about it:
Can we begin impeachment proceedings on BOTH of them and try them as a pair, impeach or not, hang together or serve together?
The constitution doesn't begin to cover it, but what about legal lore? Can congress make that move?
See Bamford
NSA's eavesdropping on some 400 thousand phone calls crossing the U.S. border was reported in the early 1970s. As late as the 1960s the U.S. international cable companies (those handling international telegrams -- RCA Global Communications, Western Union International and ITT World Communications) regularly turned over their complete traffic logs to the government. This has been reported here and there, but I know personally of the practice at one of them because I was one of the people who made the tape copies for pickup by messengers.
...military control is one way of gutting the CIA for the purpose of subverting intelligence operations that may uncover truths that are "inconvenient" for the current adminstration. The military, with its strict hierarchy and narrow focus, is much less likely to have access to the kind of independent thinking and breadth of expertise that is necessary for extracting the truth from a set of conflicting accounts, observations and intepretations of events. Transferring intel analysis to the DoD will make it much easier to "manage" the product. Plans to strip the CIA of its analysis functions have been formulated and are most likely already being implemented.
To take aim more directly at the points, I would ask you to look up the wikipedia entry on facsism. There are similarties like those shown in the 14 points. However, many of th 14 points have stretched those similarities quite a long way. Many of the 14 points are simply ways in which governments of all types have tried to gain power. Some of the more definining characteristics of facism are discussed in the wikipedia article:
"Fascism in many ways seems to have clearly developed as a reaction against Communism and Marxism, both in a philosophic and political sense, although it it can be seen as opposing democratic capitalist economics along with Marxism. It viewed the state as an organic entity in a positive light rather than as an institution designed to protect collective and individual rights, or as one that should be held in check. It tended to reject the Marxist notion of social classes (and universally dismissed the concept of class conflict), replacing it instead with two more nebulous struggles: conflict between races and the struggle of the youth versus their elders. This meant embracing nationalism and mysticism, and advancing ideas of strength and power as means of legitimacy, a might makes right that glorified war as an end in itself and determinant of truth and worthiness. An affinity to these ideas can be found in Social Darwinism. These ideas are in direct opposition to the ideas reason or rationalism characteristic of the Age of Enlightenment, from which liberalism and, later, Marxism would emerge." I'm curious to see if you find that paragraph to describe the current administration.
The labor movement marches. We recently saw demonstrations over illegal immigration we saw marches and protests.
Where are the protests over this? I would enthusiastically participate in rallies protesting these actions, but so far I've yet to see anyone calling for any, let alone organizing.
We need a "HOLD GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABLE" day and spread the word. Could we get 250,000 people to march on DC over this? IMO it's a *much* bigger deal than illegal immigration. several hundred thousand people in DC would be a force to be reckoned with. Comments on slashdot or Kos are not.