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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.
In a sane country this lawsuit would be dismissed.
This information is the business of the NSA. The NSA needs to be able to know who is calling who outside this country. The only way to have access to this information is through the phone companies. This is only a list of who called who. They would need this information to help find out which phones they would need to tap.
This is also the reason that the Federal Government's powers should be limited primarily to National Defence. This way the Federal Government would not have any conflicts of interest with any infomation accuired in the interest of National Security. Because they would have no real authority to arrest or to do anything else to a citizen of this country unless it was a National security issue.
The purpose of the National Government is to preserve our Freedom. I see no freedom lost when the Government has a list of phone numbers I have called if they are only going to take that list and perform a query against it to see if I have called up any terrorists.
How effective would the NSA be if it took them several days and a court order every time they needed to know if someone is calling terrorists? They would probably have to hire more lawyers and appoint more judges just to keep up with it all. And in the end you would not be able to run any kind of statistical analysis on the data you have collected because you would not have a complete set of data.
Just don't let Hillary have the list she will probably want to check and see if I have called the local Gun Store.