Root of the problem: "as a privatised, state-backed monopoly without a forceful regulator...."
When are governments going to learn? If you are going to privatize, you have to OPEN up the market rather than create a quasi-governmental monopoly. This reeks of mercantilism, which is a pre-capitalistic notion that it is better for a government to protect its industries than open the market to trade and/or competition.
Mercantilism always has bizarre and harmful unintended consequences.
Basically, it is one of your freedoms (privilege and immunity) to barter your right to certain legal processes in return for a good or service. That's a good thing. You WANT as many tools available as possible to obtain goods or services that you want to contract to obtain.
Every time you sign (or otherwise accept) a contract, you are giving away some right or privilege that you would have otherwise had. Signed a lease? You're trading way your right to your money once a month, and the landlord is trading away (most of) his property right to the apartment.
Keep in mind, though, that no contract can bar someone from court completely. At a minimum, someone can come to court to argue that the contract in whole (or the part baring bringing it to the courts) is unenforceable, void, or doesn't say what the other party claims it says.
Having just read the opinion, the only part of the contract that is void is the part that waives the consumer's right to class action lawsuits in court, and really only in cases involving the same basic complaint against Cingular/AT&T.
And, fwiw, people who are up in arms against the idea of binding arbitration on contracts really have very little idea of what they are talking about. Arbitration generally saves people thousands upon thousands of dollars of ridiculous lawyers fees while the two sides posture in court for months before trial.
Also, people complaining about how this all stems from the "corporate control of the government" are truly confused about life. Contracts are agreements between two private citizens or entities. Did the government come to your house and force you to sign your lease or mortgage? And in this case, it's the government that is being used by the consumer to escape from his own ignorance or bad judgment when he signed the agreement.
The tin-foil-hat crowd on slash.dot is quite substantial, I'm discovering.
There seems to be a lot of ignorance and hyperbole on slashdot regarding FISA.
First, the basics of "FISA". FISA is a statue meant to govern how and when government agencies may gather FOREIGN intelligence. FISA warrants are warrants issued by FISA-established courts authorizing the government to wiretap or survey individuals or phone numbers. A FISA warrant cannot be issued on domestic communications, since American residents and citizens are (yes, still) covered by the United States Constitution's protection against unreasonable search and seizure. So, to boil it down,
Second, warrantless wiretaps are and will always be legal (and constitutional) when both ends of the communication are outside the United States, not American citizens, and no part of the communication is routed electronically through the territorial US. Why? Because such people and communications are utterly outside the jurisdiction of the US Constitution. Think of it this way, should the US have to get a warrant (FISA or otherwise) to intercept a satellite phone conversation between Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri in Pakistan? What jurisdiction does a US court have to rule on that matter? Answer: None.
Third, the legislation in question was needed and rushed in before Congress goes on vacation because of a new ruling by a FISA judge, which had the effect of overruling the NSA's previously established powers under FISA. In other words, a judge decided in a new ruling to overturn the way things had been previously been done. This had the effect of placing our intelligence community in <a panic because it effectively crippled our ability to intercept foreign communications. See this Newsweek article for more info. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20075751/site/newsweek /
Fourth, the legal issue at hand. The brand new FISA judge ruling concerned the issue of when you know one end of the conversation is foreign, but you don't know where the other one is. In other words, should an unknown second party be assumed to be American or in the US for purposes of foreign intelligence? The new ruling said yes, but previous rulings had said no. For more info on this, see the LA Times. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la- na-spying2aug02,0,5813563.story?coll=la-home-cente r
The concern of the intelligence community was that given the current advanced state of technology and the ability to mask identities, the ruling effectively destroyed the ability of the US to wiretap ANY communication where one side was anonymous.
Maybe that's what some people here on Slashdot want, which is fine to argue. But I hope the discussion is at least conducted soberly and with some attachment to the actual difficult legal and national defense questions at hand.
Slashdot Mirror
Root of the problem: "as a privatised, state-backed monopoly without a forceful regulator...."
When are governments going to learn? If you are going to privatize, you have to OPEN up the market rather than create a quasi-governmental monopoly. This reeks of mercantilism, which is a pre-capitalistic notion that it is better for a government to protect its industries than open the market to trade and/or competition.
Mercantilism always has bizarre and harmful unintended consequences.
Basically, it is one of your freedoms (privilege and immunity) to barter your right to certain legal processes in return for a good or service. That's a good thing. You WANT as many tools available as possible to obtain goods or services that you want to contract to obtain. Every time you sign (or otherwise accept) a contract, you are giving away some right or privilege that you would have otherwise had. Signed a lease? You're trading way your right to your money once a month, and the landlord is trading away (most of) his property right to the apartment. Keep in mind, though, that no contract can bar someone from court completely. At a minimum, someone can come to court to argue that the contract in whole (or the part baring bringing it to the courts) is unenforceable, void, or doesn't say what the other party claims it says.
Having just read the opinion, the only part of the contract that is void is the part that waives the consumer's right to class action lawsuits in court, and really only in cases involving the same basic complaint against Cingular/AT&T.
And, fwiw, people who are up in arms against the idea of binding arbitration on contracts really have very little idea of what they are talking about. Arbitration generally saves people thousands upon thousands of dollars of ridiculous lawyers fees while the two sides posture in court for months before trial.
Also, people complaining about how this all stems from the "corporate control of the government" are truly confused about life. Contracts are agreements between two private citizens or entities. Did the government come to your house and force you to sign your lease or mortgage? And in this case, it's the government that is being used by the consumer to escape from his own ignorance or bad judgment when he signed the agreement.
The tin-foil-hat crowd on slash.dot is quite substantial, I'm discovering.
There seems to be a lot of ignorance and hyperbole on slashdot regarding FISA.
k /
- na-spying2aug02,0,5813563.story?coll=la-home-cente r
First, the basics of "FISA". FISA is a statue meant to govern how and when government agencies may gather FOREIGN intelligence. FISA warrants are warrants issued by FISA-established courts authorizing the government to wiretap or survey individuals or phone numbers. A FISA warrant cannot be issued on domestic communications, since American residents and citizens are (yes, still) covered by the United States Constitution's protection against unreasonable search and seizure. So, to boil it down,
Second, warrantless wiretaps are and will always be legal (and constitutional) when both ends of the communication are outside the United States, not American citizens, and no part of the communication is routed electronically through the territorial US. Why? Because such people and communications are utterly outside the jurisdiction of the US Constitution. Think of it this way, should the US have to get a warrant (FISA or otherwise) to intercept a satellite phone conversation between Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri in Pakistan? What jurisdiction does a US court have to rule on that matter? Answer: None.
Third, the legislation in question was needed and rushed in before Congress goes on vacation because of a new ruling by a FISA judge, which had the effect of overruling the NSA's previously established powers under FISA. In other words, a judge decided in a new ruling to overturn the way things had been previously been done. This had the effect of placing our intelligence community in <a panic because it effectively crippled our ability to intercept foreign communications. See this Newsweek article for more info. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20075751/site/newswee
Fourth, the legal issue at hand. The brand new FISA judge ruling concerned the issue of when you know one end of the conversation is foreign, but you don't know where the other one is. In other words, should an unknown second party be assumed to be American or in the US for purposes of foreign intelligence? The new ruling said yes, but previous rulings had said no. For more info on this, see the LA Times. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la
The concern of the intelligence community was that given the current advanced state of technology and the ability to mask identities, the ruling effectively destroyed the ability of the US to wiretap ANY communication where one side was anonymous.
Maybe that's what some people here on Slashdot want, which is fine to argue. But I hope the discussion is at least conducted soberly and with some attachment to the actual difficult legal and national defense questions at hand.