Secret Court Upholds Phone Data Collection

cold fjord writes "The Houston Chronicle reports, 'A newly declassified opinion from the government's secret surveillance court says no company that has received an order to turn over bulk telephone records has challenged the directive. The opinion by Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Judge Claire Eagan, made public Tuesday, spells out her reasons for reauthorizing the phone records collection "of specified telephone service providers" for three months. ... 'Indeed, no recipient of any Section 215 order has challenged the legality of such an order, despite the explicit statutory mechanism for doing so.'" Relatedly, the UN Human Rights Council is discussing the surveillance situation.

Comments

No Surprise

[sociocapitalist]

Why would a 'for profit' corporation go out of its way to protect the rights of consumers that don't even know they're having their privacy invaded to start with?

USA needs to get rid of the secret courts.

Re:No Surprise

[Entropius]

As an American, I am way less worried about foreigners hurting me than my government hurting me, either directly, indirectly by restricting people I'd like to do business with, or by simply confiscating part of my income as taxes to do silly things.

The check on a democratically-elected government to stop them from doing silly things is for the people to find out about it and vote the fuckers out. But we can't do this if we're not allowed to know...

Re:No Surprise

[fustakrakich]

You voted in a democrat, obviously you really didn't want any change at all.

Re:No Surprise

[AJH16]

I realize this and still vote that way. Why? Because it will put fear of the people back in the main parties. Large scale abuse of power can only occur when people who are going to do the abusing are comfortable with their power. If they realize that they will lose the power if they abuse it too much, they don't abuse it. Showing politicians that we would prefer batshit crazy to abusively corrupt, it forces them back to the table.

Re:No Surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as one of the bat shit crazy things they do is make it easier for third parties to get in (and thus easier for themselves to get reelected), I find it a perfectly acceptable tradeoff to have the country run by someone completely insane for only 4 years. Are you sure that someone bat shit crazy would even be significantly worse than the current two parties?

Re:No Surprise

[Bacon Bits]

As an American, I am way less worried about foreigners hurting me than my government hurting me, either directly, indirectly by restricting people I'd like to do business with, or by simply confiscating part of my income as taxes to do silly things.

This is something I wish more Americans would remember. Our founding fathers didn't fear terrorism. They feared tyranny.

Re:No Surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

This is sooo obscenely naive and short-sighted. We will NEVER escape from the two-party stranglehold with thinking like this. Spoiling an election (or even a couple of them) would be totally worth breaking the duopoly in the long term. Anyone who tells you otherwise is making two obvious mistakes:

1) They are blinded to the overwhelming similarities between the two major parties. Yes, there are differences on some very philosophically significant issues, but when it comes to the actual running of the country, you'll realize those "big" differences amount to a small fraction of actual decisions made. You then see that they drastically overestimate the difference achieved by switching to a govt dominated by the other party.

2) They underestimate the inertia of our massive government organization. Billions of dollars and millions of participants require extraordinary vision, planning and execution to pull off sweeping changes even in a system that lacks checks and balances. In our system of checks and balances, dramatic changes can take decades and/or massive cultural/technological change to back them up. Those who fear "so-and-so will ruin our country" dramatically underestimate what it takes to do so.

Both our current problems and our current strengths are unlikely to be dramatically altered in just a term or two of the "wrong guy in office". So stop trying to optimize short-term gains and starting voting for some long-term restructuring of the system.

There is no way in hell that two parties with so much in common can serve as anything remotely representative of our geographically and demographically complex nation. WE DESPERATELY NEED A SYSTEM OF POLITICS WITH HIGHER RESOLUTION. I'm thinking, probably, no political parties with more than 15-20% support and plenty of viable ones in the 5-10% range, requiring coalitions on legislation and executive candidates. Of course, it would also be fantastic to restore the House of Representatives to its proper ratio to the population. Locking it at around ~430 has proven disastrous and made them very non-representative.

Yahoo

[arbiterxero]

So is the Secret Court lying, or is Yahoo's Marissa, google, lavabit and a handful of other companies that supposedly challenged their compliance lying?

because someone is, and my guess is the people that are running the 'secret' courts are lying.

The threat of investigation

[hessian]

Here's the deal:

Either you go along with our investigation, and hand over all your data on everyone, or we investigate you.

We'll come in, confiscate a few vital servers, demand all your documents, interview all your staff.

This will shut down your business and cost you tens of thousands of dollars or more, but that's not our concern.

So which do you want -- rat out your customers, or get shut down?

Sincerely,
The Government

Can You Blame Them?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I know it is popular to blame the phone companies here, but don't forget what the government did to Qwest. The CEO of Qwest stood up to the government and said "NO." They put him in prison for insider trading because he sold shares months before the government canceled classified contracts in retaliation.