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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.
Ssssh! This is to secret to report on! Ohhhh great! Now the terrorists have won! Thanks alot Slashdot!
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.
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?
"Spying is such a harsh word...
We like to call it passive call attendance.
The original generic sig.
"We are scared like hell for our butts"
Read radical news here
Get it right: the blog name is "27B Stroke 6" which is a beautiful reference to the out-of-control bureaucracy in Terry Gilliam's movie "Brazil".
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
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.
If what they were doing is both legal and a State Secret, they should be able to at least prove this to a Judge "in camera" (?). Otherwise is it not possible that what is it being allegged the government requested and what they carried out are illegal acts for which both AT&T and the government should be held accountable?
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
We need a good end-to-end hardware crypto solution for voice traffic, 100% open-source and published and buildable on cheap commodity hardware. (I'm thinking PIC processors and FPGA's). We basically need a hardware-based telephone equivilent to PGP that everyone could afford, that doesn't require me to use a PC as a telephone. Phil Zimmerman's PGPhone is pretty cool and a step in the right direction. It just needs to shrink ;-)
The government should fear its population, its creator.
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.
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.
The US needs to elect a morally corupt President who has an unknown morally sound doppelganger, hope the newly elected President has a heart attack, then insert the doppelganger into power. He can than have his CPA best buddy come in and balance the budget over dinner, as well as reform the whole government over the course of 3 or 4 weeks, until the First Lady realizes he is a different person. All the country's problems would be solved.
*In this instance we ignore the fact that the President doesn't have nearly as much power as all you wonderful posters' think and that congress is responsible for the majority of the problems in this country...
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
The Gallup poll of the Muslim World found wide support for sharia among Muslims worldwide. Gallup, as I'm sure you know, is non-partisan. A simple Google search "Muslim poll sharia" would get you many others.
Funny how you accuse me of intolerance when the ultimate targets of Islamist terrorism and the institutionalization of sharia are the real victims of intolerance: homosexuals, Jews and other ME religious minorities, and women.
Well, that link is busted, but I did as you said and found some polls, and here's the thing: you left out a very important point: the muslims polled were asked if THEY would wish to operate under Sharia law. They were NOT asked if they wanted to force Sharia law on others.
That is a BIG FUCKING DIFFERENCE, and I fail to see how you can in good conscience leave that part out unless you really are trying to whip up hatred of Muslims.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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.
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.
See the Guardian for the numbers in a poll done in the UK. Among 16 to 24 year old muslims living in the UK, 37% said they would prefer to live under Sharia law, as opposed to 60% who wanted to live under UK law. I would suggest 60/40 does not constitute a vast majority. "Nearly a third of 16 to 24-year-olds believed that those converting to another religion should be executed". WTF???? The numbers do go down quite a bit for the older people polled, but double digit percentages still would prefer Sharia law even at 55 years old.
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
Right, well they are restrained by political correctness. People must remember that a movement hardly starts out as a full wanting of what they eventually end up getting. Today they might simply want to ban gay marriage, then they want to push gay rights back in another way and then after a while it keeps getting worse as the anti-gay rights agenda continues to pull votes. Fundamentalists fundamentally hate gays, it's part of their particular belief set. People that hate people will express it in any way they are given power to. Right now, fortunately, it would be the equivalent of climbing legal mount everest to get people stoned to death for being gay. However, this isn't because of the deep south, this is because of the people on the so-hated "liberal left" that actually believe in things like not killing other people because they have different beliefs and actually giving minorities rights fit for the majority. Every social equality measure that has been passed in the last century has been fought vehemently against by the deep south and other hardcore conservatives who stop just short of believing that the country wouldn't be better off if the south would've been able to keep their slaves. The republican party and the right wing have been hijacked by the south into playing social equality issues as a party platform and in this way oppose freedom much as they reinforced it in Lincoln's day.
That rant aside, what I mean to say is this: Many southerner fundamentalists (I'm not going to say all or most) are radical to the point of Muslim extremists. However, their rights to be radical are curtailed in this country by rule of law. It's lucky for all of us that the entire country isn't full of these radicals or they probably would start stoning the gay population and slaying anyone who doesn't believe in Christ.
What I find intriguing about the Borat movie which most people whitewash over in favor of the naked fighting scenes or the overt prejudice against Jewish people used for comedic purposes (even though Cohen himself is Jewish), is the way it exposes the deep south and fundamentalists and their core beliefs by changing the way the subject matter is presented. Under different circumstances, I can't imagine that the rodeo person in Borat would've admitted that part of his agenda, deep down in the back of it was to get gay people killed. However, under false pretenses he was presented with a situation which allowed him to actually admit this. When Borat says that in his country, gay people killed, the man replies: that's what we're trying to get happen here. Yes, they aren't that extreme, yet, because they are being curtailed. With any luck they will stay that way. But make no bones about it, even if they aren't overtly that extreme they believe in hatred deep down in their heart. Given the power to unleash it on the world they would indeed do so. Which in a lot of ways makes them similar to Al Queda.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
At first I thought that I was going to write a sort of general reply of why I thought that
AT&T was wrong but then I thought about it for a while and actually realized what a
precarious position AT&T (and perhaps the entire telecom industry) is in. While I still
think that AT&T can be blamed for not having enough backbone to stand up to the
government, I think the reality is that this is the government's mess and the government's
fault.
Instead of blaming AT&T, I think we should lay the blame at the feet of the United
States Government. Traditionally we have been a government that allowed a lot of
freedom and bestowed a great deal of rights on our citizens and even on non-citizen
residents (even to some degree on illegal aliens which I personally find a little difficult to
accept).
The current administration will tell us times have changed. They will say that happened
on September 11th 2001. They say that they need additional powers to protect us from
terrorists and other enemies. They say that they need the ability to spy domestically so
that they can ferret out terrorist cells operating within the United States.
On the surface all of this sounds reasonable. Even congress agreed and passed bills like
The Patriot Act and permitted the creation of the Department of Homeland Security
(which for those of you who may be critical, I understand is a cabinet position under the
control of the Executive branch but the money still needs to be appropriated by
congress). As a nation we have spent untold billions on defense most of which has been
spent on a war that many question in Iraq. The government will argue that we have had
success, that there has not been a successful terrorist attack since 2001 so they must be
doing something right.
Good government does sometimes need to have secrets. Nobody is saying that our
government should be so open that they could not plan military actions in secret. Still, in
general good government does need some transparency and does need to be held
accountable for the things it has done. We can not accept an opaque government where
everything is done in secret or where we are mislead into providing support (like the Iraq
WMD mess).
Our current administration may not be opaque but they are getting so dark that it is hard
to see behind the veil that they have set up. Even when they are told "no" they just try
another end-run and try to accomplish the same thing in a different way.
I have no special knowledge of what happened between AT&T and the FBI or Homeland
Security (or whoever it was) but I would imagine that they were squeezed very tightly
and were put in a terribly uncomfortable position before they agreed to provide
surveillance assistance. Considering the current climate in the telecom industry, I would
not be surprised if they were also promised a few favors too.
We are supposed to be a nation by the people, of the people, and for the people. I take
this to mean that the government is obliged to do the will of the people. I don't think that
this means spying on us, invading our privacy, and taking our freedoms a bit and a piece
at a time.
I am so disgusted that I just want to puke.
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
It is certainly the MOST common excuse in the world to say "But I had to do it!"