EFF Sues NSA, President Bush, and VP Cheney

VisualE writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will file a lawsuit against the National Security Agency (NSA) and other government agencies today on behalf of AT&T customers to stop the illegal, unconstitutional, and ongoing dragnet surveillance of their communications and communications records. The five individual plaintiffs are also suing President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Cheney's chief of staff David Addington, former Attorney General and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and other individuals who ordered or participated in the warrantless domestic surveillance."

Comments

Re:How can you sue?

[Gat0r30y]

Unfortunately you are probably at least a little right. Hopefully something will come out in discovery though. Often even the most secretive and closed off agencies have poor controls on what they will release during discovery, maybe the EFF gets lucky. Also, we already know what ATT and the NSA were doing, so it isn't exactly a state secret anymore. Although I wouldn't put it by this administration to argue that even though the illegal program is now public knowledge it is still a state secret because they say so.

Re:How can you sue?

[CorporateSuit]

I am not a lawyer, but some evidence is already a little glaring in this case:

People complain about government surveillance sponsored by telecoms
Telecoms say "Government made us do it!"
Everyone looks at government and says "You can't do that."
Government passes a law that says "Now we can, and we're adding in a provision to say you can't complain about when we did before we passed the law!"

I've said it before and I'll say it a thousand times if I must: The constitution was written by, for, and in behalf of terrorists, traitors, and criminals of their time. Possible terrorism is not an excuse to violate the constitution, as that is what it was written to protect. The illegal surveillance and retroactive immunity both violate the constitution.

This is like calling the police about a shooting, and when they get there, they find the dead body burned to ashes. When they ask "Why did you burn the body?" you say "Because if I burn the body, you can't arrest me for shooting him! You have no evidence!"

FISA's telco immunities might actually help!

[Khopesh]

Recall that the telco immunities in the latest FISA passage only affect the telcos, not the government. If they're bold enough, the telcos may be able to help push this forward (since they're no longer able to be held liable, all this does it make their customers more comfortable by earning back their trust). Telcos likely have tons of documents they could publish (without invading customer privacy), teasing the courts with what must be loads more that could be secured with the appropriate warrants.

As to suing the government, I believe you actually have to petition for the right to sue ... which may be problematic when there's such obvious intent to keep this under wraps. I'm sticking with my pessimistic intuition that this won't come to light until all the relevant parties have retired or been removed from office (I hope I'm wrong ... heck, there's just barely enough time for an impeachment process, too!). Since this hurdle appears to have already been passed, there must be something resembling support -- hark, did the Dems grow a backbone?

Re:FISA's telco immunities might actually help!

[demachina]

The U.S. government tends to be one of the telco's largest customers. Attacking one of your largest customers is usually not a good idea, and is unlikely to happen. I think they know I doubt it will gain them even a perceptible blip in good will with their home and small business customers. Home and small business customers mostly care how much their phone bills are and what kind of service they get for it.

If you recall Qwest pushed backed on participating in this surveillance program when it first started because of their concerns about its legality. Shortly there after the suddenly lost a huge classified telecommunications deal with the government, it caused a huge miss in their quarterly results and they couldn't talk about why because it was classified, their CEO was accused of misleading shareholders and eventually ended up in Federal prison. He may have been doing so fishy stuff for which he deserved some punishment but there was a huge signal sent from the Bush administration about playing ball.

Morale of the story is trying to fuck with the Federal government, especially the Bush administration, was and probably still is incredibly dangerous. They are, after all, people who think its OK to thrown black hoods over peoples heads and send them away to be tortured.

I doubt they will retaliate against the EFF like they did Qwest because they will probably opt to just stone wall the case and will probably succeed. Maybe a President Obama will be different but I doubt he will want all the bad people in the Bush administration perp walked because it sets a dangerous precedent for when he leaves office and a Republican President takes over.