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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."
About time...
Ray Beckerman!
*DUCKS* :)
I was going to get the first post, but the extra surveillance on my connection slowed me down.
when you can't legally get at the evidence?
The plaintiff's need to prove they were harmed in some way. And proving they were harmed will require divulging state secrets.
Case dismissed.
Is this lawsuit any different from the ACLU one though? They seem to be covering the same ground.
I bring nothing to the table.
NSA Press Conference: We have decided to take over the EFF in hopes that their participation with our goals will aid in furthering the United States' interests in National Security. We have assessed their allegations and decided that they were unwarranted and unfounded. Thank you for all your cooperation and we appreciate all the help from the leaders of the EFF.
EFF @ Gitmo: Fuck, I don't want a cock-meat sandwich...
-SaNo
How many trial did the EFF lose ?
Plenty.
To see exactly how this administration completely blows this off.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The NSA is EFF'd.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own.
When everyone in power is such a successful (not necessarily good) lair how can we even have a justice system?
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
If you were ever planning to donate to the EFF at all, now might be a good time.
http://www.eff.org/support/
What's the value of information that you don't know?
...class action suit. /me Raises hand.
...the EFF people start dropping dead after having shot themselves in the back of the head with a shotgun?
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I'm going to try to sue Nicholas Cage for being such a bad actor
That's just what they want you to think.
Either way, they're pretty tenacious and well known, they may even have as much or more public recognition by now than the ACLU.
Even if they lose this one (or don't entirely get their case), they'll still win. They've backed up some significant cases and have become well known for it, and this will only make them more popular.
In some eyes, the EFF, for what they stand for, may never be wrong, and they could quickly turn into a religion of legal sorts. Especially considering that the targets, the "general unpopular undoers of society", have already had sights set on them many times and even though the law assumes they're in the right or not so in the wrong, they're pariahs and nothing they can do can prove to the people they're not bad guys.
There's a lot of 'little guys' that have gotten hurt by the unfairness of the law when they're weighed against corporations, and it's really building up. The EFF could be one of many outlets for a meta-ideology when people really do start fighting back.
Anyways, I'm just saying this so I can say "Holy shit, I was right?!" later if it really turns out that way.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Friday:
All Members of EFF Mysteriously Vanish
They don't have anywhere near the recognition outside of the IT industry that the ACLU has.
Most of what you wrote about the EFF applies to the ACLU, also.
If they are redundantly making a case, they ought to be careful about it - the ACLU and EFF should certainly be cooperative towards each other, IMO.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
There's a nice long list of cases they won, but somehow the fact that Orlowski cited half a dozen where they'd lost (including at least one where they'd dropped the case because they'd won a victory in a related case that made it irrelevant) started the meme that they always lose.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
This time, they have much more documentation. All of these smaller suits, and some bigger ones, were basically just a way to compel the needed evidence to bring a strong case.
No, they gave the telcos (AT&T, etc.) immunity.
It'll be SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY! Check out this tag team battle of the century as the EFF and the ACLU take on the NSA and The Bush Administration in this BATTLE TO THE DEATHHHHHHHHH! EXTREME action! Blood, violence, lawyers TO THE MAX!
ONLY ON PAY PER VIEW!
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
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?
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Oh look, someone who reads Andrew Orlowski articles.
Oh look, someone who jumps to conclusions. You seem to be disagreeing with my simple factual statement that the EFF has lost a lot of cases. Any evidence to back this up?
There's a nice long list of cases they won
First of all, that nice long list of cases does not disprove my assertion, that they lost plenty of cases. That list doesn't have their losses I notice.
Secondly, in several of those cases the EFF's role was to file an amicus curiae briefs. As an attorney I would never be so grasping as to consider a case I filed such a brief in as a "win." Who knows whether the judge even read them.
Thirdly I am unfamiliar with this Andrew Orlowsky person you mention. All I'm sure of on the subject is that I am not him.
We have an ever increasing need for a reputable organisation such as the EFF fighting our corner. Governments and corporations have woken up to the digital revolution, and they all want their piece of the pie - often at our expense. They are one of the few organisations I donate monthly to, and I'm not even a US citizen / resident. They really do try and make a difference online and as evidenced by this story, there are no opponents too rich or powerful for them to take a stand against.
... Also, they gave me a "free" t-shirt. \o/
She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro....
The EFF does not of course always win, but it does frequently and has effected quite a bit of change to bad law as a result.
http://www.eff.org/victories/
Outlines just some of the major victories.
The EFF also sometimes engages in cases where probability of victory is lower, but we judge that the case must be fought, and that public benefit will come just from the fighting, and the hearing of evidence in open court. Of course we hope to win, but we also know that even if we don't win, there are other upsides.
This case (and the case vs. AT&T) get much of their benefit simply by having a court examine this illegal wiretapping program. Part of our message is that this program has not been subject to review by the courts, and that in of itself is bad.
The ACLU won early victory but fell down due to standing. We have well established evidence of massive interception of traffic. While some might think there is only an illegal wiretap if the government listens to you, it is unlawful for them to even intercept your communications, even if they toss them away later. Warrants must name specific targets, and it is the job of phone companies to isolate the traffic of targets and hand it over under lawful warrants. The government does not get to just intercept all the traffic and pull out what it desires.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
News =
"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 what they allege to be 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."
- Alaska Jack
Either way, they're pretty tenacious and well known, they may even have as much or more public recognition by now than the ACLU.
Hint: Go OUTSIDE into the light son. Outside... Just once in a while. Ask people (real people, not people on /. or IRC) if they even know who the EFF is. Ask them if they know who the ACLU is. Seeing as you'll be doing this you might want to bring along a flyer or someting so you can explain what Linux is, what open source is, and then explain what the word freedom means to those people. It'll be good for you. You might even get a tan.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
They didn't vote for nor conduct the program in its current form. They just voted for the a bill that didn't hold telcom companies accountable for being duped by the government. (Obama didn't even like that part, but felt it was a necessary compromise to get the otherwise beneficial bill through.)
In other words, he compromised his alleged principles and voted for a completely unconstitutional bill.
No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.
Conversely, a form of ex post facto law commonly known as an amnesty law may decriminalize certain acts or alleviate possible punishments (for example by replacing the death sentence with life-long imprisonment) retroactively.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
"ONLY ON PAY PER VIEW!"
Nah. I'll just wait until someone puts up the DivX torrent on Pirate Bay.
"But this one goes to 11!"
First of all, that nice long list of cases does not disprove my assertion, that they lost plenty of cases.
Don't be throwin stones from your glass house - your assertion of the unnumbered 'plenty' aint shit without a cite.
At least he did better in one post than you have in two.
That list doesn't have their losses I notice.
Ah, so it is up to him to prove your point too? No wonder lawyers have such a piss poor rep.
Why don't people understand that the bill that granted "telecom immunity" really was a compromise because it added the requirement that the president personally authorize the action? This bill is what opened him up to liability--now the EFF is able to sue the government agencies and officials even if they can't win against AT&T.
I'd kill for a 5% stake in AIG right now. With the government backing an 85 billion dollar loan to AIG, most of their business still being successful (including a 20-50 billion dollar airline business), there's a good chance that the government is going to make a profit on this transaction. If I had 5% of that pie, I could retire an immeasurably wealthy man once this all blows over!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
No, they gave the telcos (AT&T, etc.) immunity.
However, the Constitution specifically forbids Congress from writing any ex-post-facto laws, which includes retroactive immunity.
That means anyone who voted for the telecon (no typo) immunity bill has broken their oath of office to defend the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic.
I'm sure plenty of people will still vote for Obama even though he willfully voted for an unconstitutional bill (not that McCain is any better). It just shows you that neither party is a true opposition party when it comes to screwing over the American people.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
EFF begins fundraising campaign targeted at Bush haters.
They lost the 2600 case, and the Blizzard v. bnetd case -- so hypertext links are not free speech, the DMCA interoperability exception applies only to "program to program" interoperability and not "program to data", software which violates protection mechanisms are not free speech, and reverse-engineering a product by examining its output is copyright infringement.
No, it does not include retroactive immunity.
These are the ex post facto laws, according to the Supreme Court in Calder v. Bull :
-----
1st. Every law that makes an action , done before the passing of the law, and which was innocent when done, criminal; and punishes such action.
2nd. Every law that aggravates a crime, or makes it greater than it was, when committed.
3rd. Every law that changes the punishment, and inflicts a greater punishment, than the law annexed to the crime, when committed.
4th. Every law that alters the legal rules of evidence, and receives less, or different, testimony, than the law required at the time of the commission of the offence, in order to convict the offender.
----
A law making something NOT a crime when it was a crime when committed is not covered.
(incidentally, the Supreme Court has pretty much chipped the 3rd one away to nothing since Calder v. Bull)
There is a suggestion in what you write that "reverse engineering ... is infringement" because we lost the case. In cases such as these, there was a plaintiff declaring this to be so. This seems to imply that the defendants might have won had we not gotten involved, which is surely not not true. We may have wasted resources, of course.
But I hope nobody thinks you can win them all. If you win them all, you are in fact not at the edge, and we try to only take cases on the edge. In spite of that, we win a lot.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
However, the Constitution [wikipedia.org] specifically forbids Congress from writing any ex-post-facto [wikipedia.org] laws, which includes retroactive immunity.
WRONG!!! the ex-post-facto clause means that you can not create a law and then charge people for what are now crimes that were committed prior to the passage of the law. It does not address the decriminalization of an act in the past. If that were the case, a presidential pardon would be unconstitutional.
Forgot to add: The Blizzard case did not rule that reverse engineering is infringement. Rather, it hinged on whether they could enforce a "no reverse engineering" cause in the click-to-agree EULA on the games. We're going to see a lot more cases in the future (not just involving EFF) about what clauses in click-to-agree contracts are valid, I think I can predict.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Because the ex-post-facto thing is one way. If the law made it easier to convict, it would be ex post facto. Since it makes it harder to convict -- that is, you still need all the same evidence that you needed before to convict, PLUS you need the lack of this letter -- it is not covered.
They don't have anywhere near the recognition outside of the IT industry that the ACLU has.
No they don't, but have they started to get a reputation in the legal industry? The reason I ask (and hope that somebody can answer) is because the ACLU has become publicly known more because of how long it's been around than its recent cases. I imagine that the EFF could be in the position that the ACLU was in a few decades ago. I imagine that the legal professionals, who watch cases more closely and see patterns much sooner than the public would, might see the EFF as an up and coming organization.
Either way, I sincerely hope that they win this case. Our civil liberties have been eroded enough since 9/11, thank you very much, and I for one wouldn't mind a few legal cases putting the fear of constitutional restrictions into the heart of our next president.
You can donate here.
you had me at #!
You are incorrect. Calder V. Bull deals with Article 1 Section 10 which deals with STATES. Article 1 Section 9 deals with CONGRESS of the US.
Of course that doesn't stop any court, including the supreme from changing the meaning of words in the constitution.
Don't you remember when Scalia recently went on ABC saying that not all torture is cruel and unusual punishment?
If you don't think that giving retroactive immunity to corporations who spied on American citizens wasn't what the framers had in mind when they wrote in Article 1 Section 9, "No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed." you must be smoking something.
Please go read what Thomas Jefferson had to say about the judicial branch and maybe you'll be able to get a somewhat clearer picture.
Also remember that the supreme court has ruled that how much wheat you can grow on your own land is "interstate commerce" and can be regulated by congress.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
If it was impossible, then if when prohibition was repealed, those convicted under it would still face jail.
You can ex-post-facto make something more lenient, and essentially give people a "Get out of jail free" card. You can not make a law that specifies a harsher punishment for a existing crime, and have it apply to those already conviceted.
I think we should reintroduce a practice done in one of the ancient Greek city states (Sparta or Athens). When the city leader left office they held a "trial" based on the actions he took while in office. If his tenure was unpopular enough, they banished him for a period of time. It was a normal and automatic part of leaving office. If we did this, where could we banish Bush?
Very presumptuous of you, you assume I'm a boy, you assume I don't leave the house, you assume the people I talk to haven't heard of the EFF, you assume the people I talk to either do not know what open source is or the knowledge is prerequisite to knowing the EFF exists and what they do, and worst of all, you assumed I don't already have a tan!
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Well, of course we differ, but in one respect you are clearly wrong. What will come of this, at a minimum, is that a court will consider what was done, and will examine the evidence of EFF witnesses. The court may rule against us, the court may rule that the case can't proceed due to state secrets, but at a minimum there will still have been a court. Right now we have unilateral action by the executive branch.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Very presumptuous of you, you assume I'm a boy, you assume I don't leave the house, you assume the people I talk to haven't heard of the EFF, you assume the people I talk to either do not know what open source is or the knowledge is prerequisite to knowing the EFF exists and what they do, and worst of all, you assumed I don't already have a tan!
There's an "insensitive clod" lurking somewhere in there!
As much as I don't care for his poor leadership. It is important to point out that the NSA's version of carnivore was in development before Bush took office.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Well yeah? There ARE NO GIRLS on the internet. If you see one it is a trap.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Yes, he could. The only exception to the American president's pardon power is "in matters
of impeachment". Anyone in the Executive or Judicial branch may be impeached (accused)
and removed from office (convicted). I'm not sure about impeaching Congressmen and Senators,
but those two bodies do get to write their own rules about how they run themselves.
So, whether the voiding of the pardon power applies narrowly to just this specific impeachment
plus removal process, or whether it means that any crime relating in some way to someone's
impeachment, would be decided by the Supreme Court. I suspect the narrower interpretation
was the "original intent", that is, that the presidential pardon power cannot override
the Congress's impeach and remove from office power.
My inner cynic tells me to expect Bush to issue a blanket pardon for everyone that ever did anything
in or with this administration, for any crime they committed or may have committed. (I should have
listened to it and bought oil and weapons stocks when Bush got in.)
I'm not sure if a presidential pardon prevents prosecution by the States.
If it does, then the only option left would be an International Tribunal. I don't think
wiretapping would be an international issue, but violations of the Geneva Convention (torture,
no due process when determining whether or not someone is an "Enemy Combatant") could.
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