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Telecoms Facing $50 Billion Lawsuit for Wiretaps
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.'"
First after a call to AT&T, where I had a nice 15 minute talk with the customer service representative (she was aware there was something going on and had some canned response for reporters, but didn't understand what the "big deal" (her words) was, until I explained it to her. By the end of the conversation, she agreed that this was pretty scary... or at least pretended to, but she sounded sincere.) who told me that only one other customer had called her to complain (about 2pm).
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. 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.
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
In a recent news article, 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.
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.
>"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
In any case, the extent of the violation of my privacy and my rights guaranteed by the constitution are not measured by counting snouts.
I have to wonder if Bush can claim martial law like Lincoln did way back during the Civil War. If you remember, Lincoln essentially declared an end to free speech for a while and arrested anyone who was suspected of any sort of dissent. They were held without habeaus corpus. Certainly, Bush has and can claim that we are fighting a war on terrorism and that we need whatever information the NSA/CIA/FBI/DoD need to "protect" us. The US is becoming a really scary place to live in.
"The telecommunications companies allegedly complied with an effort by the National Security Agency to build a vast database of calling records"
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.
Okay, let's start with the obvious...
First, we go to USPS and file a change of address form. 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.
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.
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 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.
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.