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AT&T Says Spying Is Too Secret For Courts
The Wired blog 26B Stroke 6 reports on the arguments AT&T and the US government made to an appeals court hearing motions in the case the EFF brought against the phone giant for their presumed part in the government's program(s) to spy on Americans. In essence AT&T seems to have argued that the case against the telecom for allegedly helping the government spy on Americans is too secret for any court, despite the Administration's admission it did spy on Americans without warrants.
So let me get this straight. AT&T says it can't defend itself because it would endanger national security (basically, AT&T is guilty), and because of this, the case should be throw out (a win for AT&T)?
But I guess logic like that is adequate for government work.
>> Now the terrorists have won!
As a matter of fact, they have. It is not about destroying a country, or individuals, it is a about destroying a lifestyle and beliefs (.i.e democracy) AFAIK they have won.
May I use your sig please?
You either have the rule of law, or you have "national security." They are mutually exclusive. Anything too secret to be brought before the law is too secret to be judged by it. Therefore it is outside the law, making the government a law unto itself, unaccountable to the public.
Funny how that works. It's pretty much always the case that, paraphrasing parts of the Bible here, when men give up obedience to law and order, good rules and the ethic of accountability, that moral decline in the population begins. What? Bush's supporters didn't realize that the rule of law is just about the keystone of public morality?
It's mind boggling how just about anything that the Federal Government Agencies don't want the public to see, hide behind this excuse and usually get their way..
The ability to call upon such protection should be regulated and restricted, but when's the last time Congress did anything positive for us citizens?
it is a about destroying a lifestyle and beliefs (.i.e democracy)
Uhm... No it's not. It's about getting political power.
A matter of internal security: the age-old cry of the oppressor.
A government that is not accountable to its population is by default invalid and unjust, and needs to be delt with accordingly. Thank God we have the soap box and ballot box in this Great Country and have options to bring about change in a constructive manner. In other places, the ammo box is the only option available.
AT&T is between a rock and a hard place. If they continue to say the case should be thrown out, the public will ridicule them. If they actually present evidence in their defense, the government can prosecute them for divulging state secrets. (Anyone who has a security clearance can testify to the penalties for the unauthorized release of classified information.) There really are no good options for AT&T.
*Real children by age and all those that can't deal with the 21st Century.
From Frank Zappa:
You say yer life's a bum deal
'N yer up against the wall . . .
Well, people, you ain't even got no kinda
Deal at all
'Cause what they do
In Washington
They just takes care of NUMBER ONE
An' NUMBER ONE ain't YOU
You ain't even NUMBER TWO
A court should always, in any case, be able to get all information from any company. If a company is not willing to provide data to a court, they should be prosecuted for obstruction. Especially in cases concerning the common good, like in this case.
If this case is really too secret for a court, it proves that the government is commiting illegal activities, which puts them on the same line with terrorists regarding being a threat to the society.
In a democracy, people always have the right to know what their government is doing. It seems democarcy died in the US and has been replaced by a more totalitarian government, surrounded by some large allied corporations, which tries to rule everything and anyone under the false pretext of protecting democracy and freedom.
Which freedom? No privacy is no freedom!
The only way to restore democracy and freedom in the US is to prosecute and sentence the corporations, like AT&T, that are helping the current government remove democracy and the freedom from it's citizens.
If the court cannot sentence AT&T, the general public can. Just drop all your business with AT&T, cancel your contracts, let them feel they went too far this time.
Nonsense. The Islamist goal is not simple destruction of certain features of Western society, but the replacement of its lifestyle and beliefs with sharia. Islamists could probably care less about the average American's loss of civil liberties--in fact, this change makes life more difficult for some would-be terrorists--while things like tolerance of homosexuality, equality of men and women under the law, and religious diversity continue just as before.
I think the west has gotten to lax, not enough people remember anymore what freedom and democracy are REALLY about. This will change, it has before and it will again. Dictatorship just don't work, it ain't the natural state of affairs.
BUT neither is freedom. The result is that you have a constant seesaw motion between the two extremes, the best you can hope for is that you happen to live during one of the quiet moments BUT you will only be able to do so thanks to the efforts of people who have come before.
The sad fact is the seventies generation has done shit for freedom, they shouted a lot but haven't actually acomplished a single thing. It was the WW2 generation that has formed what we like to think of as our free society. They had to, WW2 forced change. Equality of the sexes and races is a direct result of the allied efforts to turn the tide of war.
But whatever they achieved the natural state of affairs is to take back every hard won liberty for the practical day to day running of the world. Just as WW2 saw the injust internment of the japanese this war two has its miscarriages of justice.
but it ain't gone over the edge, the proof? We can still report on it, the story of this and other mistakes is getting out and is getting attention. If the dictators had won, you wouldn't even know about it until you were taken off the street and never heard from again.
As much as these stories may shock you they fact that they come out are proof that the system is still working.Not well, but then we get the system we voted for and Bush was re-elected.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Let me get this straight. The President declares himself above the law. Government agencies routinely violate the constitution in the name of national security. Habeus Corpus is effectively suspended (just by saying "he's a terrorist"). AT&T won't resists testifying in spy cases because its info is too secret for courts. Our citizens and treasure are squandered in an unprovoked war of adventurism. And the thing that really gets your panties in a bunch is that some guy calls for a jury revolt? Think of the children!!!!1!
I am not a crackpot.
Polls on Muslim diaspora communities in the West regularly show a disturbingly large percentage of Muslims desire the institutionalization of sharia, regard certain terrorists as noble figures, and reject many values of the societies that they have come to live among. Even if it is not a majority, it is much, much greater than the 1% you quite naively assume.
AT&T is evil, and is a willing participant with the government factions that want to throw us, head first, into an Orwellian nightmare.
Furthermore, if you continue to do business with them *you* are a willing participant, and should grow some balls.
Now, Comcast and their ilk are pretty evil, but they aren't nearly as bad as AT&T. Neither are the other major telecoms, and most certainly the RBOCs.
If you _really_ want to make a difference in whatever small way you can, get off Slashdot, research an alternative phone company, ISP, or wireless company, and *switch*.
Don't buy service from Cingular.
Don't buy service from SBC/Ameritech/AT&T/whatever else the monster has eaten up.
Turn off your DSL and switch to cable. Turn off your long-distance service and get VOIP or an RBOC's POTS unlimited plan.
RBOCs are still out there; there just hurting for business. But many of these companies will guarantee that none of their records will go to the government (and in my area, TDS Metrocom is advertising this). There's still some leak over to AT&Ts systems, as they use AT&Ts local loops, but the more people that switch away from paying into AT&Ts pockets, the better.
This is particularly relevant for Cingular. If you have Cingular, you should wise up. Sprint's SERO plans are cheaper, T-mobile is somewhat cheaper, and has vastly better customer service, and Verizon's footprint is larger and more reliable. Not to mention the regional carriers, which beat up Cingular market-by-market.
There is no reason to do business with this devil of a company. While the government empowers them to do evil, the $$ they use for their transactions come from consumers, and you all need to wise up.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Sharia law is inherently unfree. Even if they do not want to force it on non-Muslims, it would still be unacceptable for them to use it in their own communities, for then women, homosexuals, the sexually liberal, etc. would be subject to discrimination. Do you think that when sharia is instituted in a majority-Muslim country, people can just opt out?
That's basically what was said back when the Roman Republic fell. The Roman Imperial rule lasted for about 400-500 years. Though there were brief thoughts and talk of returning to the Republic, it never happed.
Those who forget History are doomed to repeat it.
While you might argue that "We're different now", I would also point out that we're really not. We've been passing laws to strip away rights for decades, and the Supreme Court has been upholding them. Take, for example, the Japanese internment during WWII. Although there was lip service paid to how wrong it was much later, the Supreme Court upheld the decision. More importantly, Congress has never put in place new laws to prevent it from happening again.
You can expect this to take place in the future when we've had yet another panic attack. The laws are all set up for this. Only now it can be done in secret. Indeed, there are Prisons being built in the mid-west right now which have this as their optional charter.
I'd like to share your optimism. But I see nothing which supports it except some political lipservice.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
No, so say the Islamists themselves. I guess you missed e.g. the recent scandal around several UK mosques after their imams were busted calling for the overthrow of British society and its replacement with sharia, or the Australian imam last year who said women who don't cover up to Muslim norms are inviting rape. The most vocal strata of Muslim leaders are embarassing themselves so regularly that one cannot reasonably claim it's just a conspiracy theory.
Do you think that when sharia is instituted in a majority-Muslim country, people can just opt out?
Honestly? No. We can't opt out of Christian marriage laws here and we can't buy booze on Sunday in a lot of places. Religious laws in general suck, and Sharia is a pretty harsh set of laws. Turkey banned the pro sharia, Muslim Refah party on the grounds that Sharia is incompatible with democracy.
I wonder if the Muslim's being polled understand the implications of their decisions. Perhaps they feel that, being in a country founded on a constitution they will be protected from the excesses of Sharia law? I would like to know more about the questions and the methodology of these polls. Also, except for one very unscientific poll conducted in Chicago, I can't find any American polls.
Religions in general breed intolerance. The fundamentalist religious right here in America is every bit as frightening as any Muslim theocracy. I say we get religion out of government all together. I don't want religions of any sort telling me what to do, what to drink, who to marry and so forth.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
OK. To put it mildly, you're really scared of Islam. Fair enough. Perhaps you or someone you care about is a member of a minority living somewhere under an oppressive religious state. Whether or not your fears of religious discrimination are justified -- I don't know where you live -- you should probably be glad that there are such nations in the world as the United States, where the prohibition of a state religion is codified in law. Furthermore, you should be likewise concerned when the rule of law is perverted by the likes of the current US administration with its illegal wiretapping program. Because once the authority of the Constitution over the government is questioned, all sorts of things become possible. For instance, the establishment of an official religion, whose laws would be imposed on believers and unbelievers alike.
I am not a crackpot.
Having spent much of my youth among Fundamentalists in the Deep South, I have never, ever heard a call among them for instituting e.g. the public stoning of homosexuals or taking the lash to adultresses, punishments which are extremely common in the most theocratic parts of the Muslim world. The things that American conservative Christians are vocal about, say, allowing a prayer before a high school football game or tweaking a biology textbook, as odious as they may be to many desiring complete separation of church and state, are in no way comparable to the gory brutality of Muslim theocracies that exist as we speak.
Good points. Except the bit about Iran, their current president notwithstanding. Persians tend to be a bit different than others in the region.
Spirituality is neutral. Organized religion has always been more about power than a personal relationship with the divine. No one needs a priest to know God, or the Universe, or whatever you want to call it.
I am well aware of the more tolerant branches of Christianity. To be honest, religion is a positive force in most of the lives it touches. However, I think other institutions not based on power and control (such as many of the branches of Buddhism or Taoism, which, without a focus on the divine I hesitate to call "religions.") would serve as well if not better, and would not have the many down sides of organized religion.
Would I outlaw religion? Never. It would be counterproductive for one thing. And without something to take its place, it would do more harm than good.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton