Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Is the U.S. in a constant state of emergency? If so, why?
"Orwellian" is an overused term, but it applies here. The state in 1984 has extraordinary powers because it's in a constant war/state of emergency.
when faced with the option of complying with federal law or challenging it, im willing to guess most major corporations that butter their bread with federal dollars would be reluctant to question so much as the color of the stamp on the envelope in which the request was delivered.
Good people go to bed earlier.
My experience with telephone companies tells me that their only response upon receiving such an order would be to figure out how to pass along double the costs of it to me and if it ever became public tell me it was an upgrade.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
We are cattle. When they want us for dinner they will come calling.
Our government is so far out of hand that I don't recognize it anymore.
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.
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
Futurist Traditionalism
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.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
It also says that FISA court believed that Congress has been told about the programs, when they voted to renew it. However we learn that this is not true. Congress members were kept in the dark by Mike Rogers (Michigan's rep).
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130917/14032124558/fisa-court-pretends-congress-actually-was-told-details-bulk-surveillance-even-though-it-wasnt.shtml
FISA court thought one thing, and NSA's stooge Mike Rogers of Michigan decided Congress should be kept in the dark and vote based on lies. So the court voted to uphold it.
Curious how secrecy can be leveraged into laws by these creeps. The Telco's are not the ones being spied on, so they're not the 'protagonist' in any lawsuit. Worse they make a good profit from the NSA, so they're more like NSA contractors, paid to spy on Americans. Hardly likely to complain!
In America (and Canada, Britain, and Australia) the law is based on an adversarial legal process. If everyone is friends, then this process doesn't really work. Theoretically, the government isn't supposed to be friends with anyone. The founding father's never trusted government, and hence they built in safeguards to protect the country from tyranny. Today's situation where the government is closely linked to large corporations is a new and different form of tyranny. Unfortunately, this was not invisaged when the founding father's wrote the constitution, and hence the courts are not set up to deal with it.
Except for Joseph Nacchio of Qwest, who openly defied the NSA in 2002, and demanded a court order. He was then prosecuted for "insider trading" for selling some stock just before the US government pulled all Qwest's contracts as revenge for helping to expose the program of illegal surveillance. Nacchio was a hero, and no one even noticed. http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm