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EFF Documentation Victory in Telco Spying Case

Posted by Zonk on Thu Nov 08, 2007 01:52 PM
from the keeping-things-on-the-up-and-up dept.
Privacy Government The Courts United States Politics News
Krishna Dagli sent on a link to Ars Technica's coverage of an EFF victory in a court case related to the NSA/Telco spying scandal. "Judge Vaughn Walker ruled today that AT&T, Verizon, Cingular (now part of AT&T), Sprint, and BellSouth (also part of AT&T now) must all maintain any data or papers related to the NSA spying case that Walker is overseeing in California. The EFF had requested the ruling out of concern that documents would be destroyed as part of routine data deletion practices before the case could even progress to discovery."
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Submission: A small victory for the EFF: EFF, Telcos and NSA by Krishna Dagli (768334)
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  • The EFF is Awesome (Score:3, Insightful)

    by explosivejared (1186049) <hagan.jared@NOspAm.gmail.com> on Thursday November 08 2007, @01:56PM (#21284487)
    Granted, the EFF is a group of lawyers, but they are lawyers working for a better Internet. Sometimes they make me just want to cry. Hopefully this is just the beginning. The NSA has gone way beyond breaking the law. The ease at which they put people under surveilance and on watchlists flies in the face of the constitutional ban on unreasonable searches and bills of attainder. This is great news.

    • Re:The EFF is Awesome (Score:4, Interesting)

      by sm62704 (957197) on Thursday November 08 2007, @02:49PM (#21285129) Journal
      constitutional ban on unreasonable searches

      My 4th amendment rights have been violated not once but TWICE this year alone. And I'm a 55 year old white guy, I can only imagine if I were young, black, or Hispanic!

      The first one was ironically on Memorial day. I'd run across an old girlfriend, and gave her my phone number and told her where I'd moved, but asked her to wait before visiting as my daughter was in town that weekend. I got home and went to bed, daughter still out with her friends.

      My daughter woke me up - "dad, there's some strange woman on the porch swing and she says she knows you." It was Chris, [slashdot.org] the old girlfriend. Her live-in BF had seen her with me and locked her out of the house (I guess he has very good reason to hate my guts).

      A knock came at the back door - it was the police. Chris had scared teh elderly neighbors, banging on their door. She must have really looked the witch carrying that broom (no I am NOT making this up). I told the cops I was glad they were there and told them about Chris' being locked out. They called teh BF and gave her a ride home, but before they did they informed me that they had opened my garage and had a look around inside - on the day we commemmorate those who died defending the Constitution.

      The second time I gave the wrong two ladies a ride to the wrong house. A big black SUV cut us off as we were leaving, and several very large men wearing vests with FBI, DEA and POLICE on them (the DEA guy was wearing a ski mask - in July!) accosted us, searched me, my car, and the ladies' purses before sending us on our way. No arrest, no warrant, nothing but guns and tasers. No Constitutional rights either, I guess. In the War On (some) Drugs (and the prostitutes who use them I guess), the first casualty was the Constitution.

      Liberty? What liberty? [kuro5hin.org]

      -mcgrew
    • what's really scary is that from reading the article I can tell that they are snooping my every packet (seems my packets must pass thru that peering point) .... including now when I'm reading a web page that's discussing the NSA and their breaking of the law .....
      • (and I should add every packet you send and receive to kernel.org since PAIX is in there too)

  • Of course this being the EFF... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...they will go on to lose the case itself. Too bad.

  • Related Article (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kludge (13653) on Thursday November 08 2007, @02:18PM (#21284745)
    From yesterday:
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/07/AR2007110700006.html?sub=AR [washingtonpost.com]
  • may indeed be a distant headlight of a big oncoming train. I can't help but think that if more and more judges are making reasonable decisions, even if not enough such decisions, then the country is waking up from the darkness. Yes, I know, DST doesn't really help, but every little bit of goodness counts. It's not like jurisprudence works like the latest fashion fad, it takes time. Now, we only need for a couple of them to have emails go missing (seems a favorite of the current administration) to show culpa

  • Data Retention/Deletion (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby (173196) on Thursday November 08 2007, @02:23PM (#21284803) Homepage Journal

    routine data deletion practices

    Convenient (for telcos) how they're required by law to retain personal data on people which they exploit for profit, but routinely delete evidence of telco crimes.

    "These days it's all secrecy, and no privacy." - The Rolling Stones, "Fingerprint File" [gettherhythm.com]

  • Wanna take it a step further? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Seakip18 (1106315) on Thursday November 08 2007, @02:29PM (#21284875) Journal
    Here's a longer NPR part than the article [npr.org]

    This whole thing just reeks of sketchiness. If congress wanted to show some actually fortitude, they should knock the immunity out, even if there is a veto by the President.

  • Winning a battle, losing a war? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by maroberts (15852) on Thursday November 08 2007, @02:34PM (#21284939) Homepage Journal
    Judges generally grant motions related to discovery to be on the safe side, to limit chances of appeal later. Only the most unreasonable discovery requests are likely to be refused.

    The EFF have to find something in that discovery to win their action, and that is the uphill battle....
    • Yeah, and at least from the wording it sounds like this merely assured they would not be automatically deleted - that's still not a decision the EFF will ever see any of it. Clearly the court wouldn't let it be arbitrarily destroyed, so I don't see the big news. This is the kind of motions even SCO was granted...

    • The EFF have to find something in that discovery to win their action, and that is the uphill battle....

      No, I think the real uphill battle is to get the appeals courts to treat "State Secrets! State Secrets! Look at the Wookie!" with the dignity it deserves. Once they get a court to say that State Secrets can't be used to hide State Crimes, at least one or two of the cases ought to be downhill.

  • the telcos would quite happily delete the data anyway and be in contempt... they'd get pardoned for it and a pat on the back from the executive branch...

  • "Judge Vaughn Walker ruled today that AT&T, Verizon, Cingular (now part of AT&T), Sprint, and BellSouth (also part of AT&T now) must all maintain any data or papers related to the NSA spying case that Walker is overseeing in California.

    "Now, Mr. Telco, you be good now and don't destroy any of those documents that may incriminate you in the future, okay? We don't know what documents you have, but we'll ask you to not shred them until we actually can proceed to ask you for them."

    Really why is the

    • If you realize you're gunna get caught and you can take the punishment, why risk adding to it? The punishment for a murderer is sufficiently high that they'll be willing to risk added punishment if it increases the chances they get away clean. In this case those asked to retain the papers won't see life in prison if they're found guilty - they can take the punishment - so why make it worse? If evidence springs up that they did in fact destroy evidence they were specifically ordered to keep, both their pu

  • AT&T gave feds access to all Web & phone t (Score:3, Informative)

    by John Sokol (109591) on Thursday November 08 2007, @07:07PM (#21288491) Homepage Journal

    AT&T gave feds access to all Web, phone traffic, ex-tech says

    http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2004001159_spying08.html [nwsource.com]

      he alleged that the NSA set up a system that vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the help of AT&T and without obtaining a court order.

    NSA built a special room in San Francisco to receive data streamed through an AT&T Internet room containing "peering links," or major connections to other telecom providers. Other so-called secret rooms reportedly were constructed at AT&T sites in Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego and San Jose, Calif

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Qzukk (229616)
      I hope the rest of you have called your Congressmen.

      I called their offices several times, but every time I started talking about this immunity stuff, they kept hanging up on me, the bastards!
          • If they suddenly can't find documents they were known to have had, it looks quite bad for them and could leave them open to prosecution.
            • Look at the names. All belong to Ma Bell family. Also notice that T-mobile is not in the list. I am not surprised if they just tell the judge "Oops, too late. We did not know!".

    • I hope the rest of you have called your Congressmen.
      IIRC, the House already passed a bill without immunity. It's the Senate who is considering adding immunity to their version of the FISA reform bill. Then the two bills would go to conference, and a frankenstein of the two would be enacted.

      So call your Senators. They'll be voting on this soon.

      • Well that, and the big smirk I get every morning when I find out how much worse things have gone in Iraq. Man, I love watching the failure of ignorant assholes who ignore good advice.

        So it's about winning the argument, eh? You're not alone in predicting that invading Iraq was a bad move. But taking satisfaction in our failure in Iraq seems perverse to me. After all, although the Executive made mistakes and Congress rubber stamped them, the mistakes hurt us all (Iraqis included). Every time I see another

          • You use the future tense - I think the past tense is more appropriate.

            We haven't yet taken to the streets, AK-47s in hand. One nice thing about the rule of law is that for all the absurdities of our government and our legal system, people don't generally resolve disputes in America with bullets. I think we tend to forget that a lot when we talk about how jacked up the government is, how we should kill all the laywers, etc. Life without daily bloodshed has a lot to recommend to it.

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          all time low since the war

          Let us know when they manage to make it better than it was before the war started.

            • Re:Congress is useless. Why bother. (Score:4, Insightful)

              by sm62704 (957197) on Thursday November 08 2007, @02:26PM (#21284831) Journal
              Last time I checked

              You checked? I call bullshit.

            • Re:Congress is useless. Why bother. (Score:5, Informative)

              by Sique (173459) on Thursday November 08 2007, @03:10PM (#21285443) Homepage
              Given that Iraq has at least 100,000 deaths (that's according to the U.S. Army, other sources estimate 250,000 and more) due to homicide and war since 2003, that's four years and on average 25,000 each year. The death poll of Saddam Hussein's rule is put at 300,000 for the whole of more than 30 years, which results in 10,000 per year. Basicly the death rate has more than doubled since the starting of the Iraq war.

              • Re:Congress is useless. Why bother. (Score:4, Interesting)

                by sconeu (64226) on Thursday November 08 2007, @04:01PM (#21286175) Homepage Journal
                And of those deaths, the vast majority, in excess of 90%, were caused by...

                wait for it....

                OTHER IRAQIS!!! Not US servicemen.

                • in excess of 90%, were caused by... OTHER IRAQIS!

                  Really? Do you think you can prove that?

                  Because it's my understanding that the #1 cause of violent death in Iraq is still US airstrikes. Lots of explosives going off in urban areas leads to lots of death. In all this talk about suicide bombers people see to forget that the US air power drops MUCH larger bombs on targets in Iraq. Shia death squads are a very close second. Deaths from Sunni insurgent snipers and bombers don't even really come close. This is easy to understand when you realize they're outnumb

                  • OK, yeah. I pulled the number out of my ass. But I still contend that the vast majority of killings there are Iraqi on Iraqi.
                • Actually, according to a peer-reviewed study published in the Lancet in 2006,

                  31% of those were attributed to the Coalition, 24% to others, 46% unknown. [wikipedia.org]

                • Ok... Let me rephrase that:

                  Before the invasion Iraqis killed Iraqis at a rate of 10,000 per year. After the invasion Iraqis killed Iraqis at a rate of 22,500 a year. That's helping progress towards democracy exactly how?

                  I am not a bible type at all, but one sentence I think is very important: Matthew 7,16 (rephrased in Matthew 7,20): "So then, you will know them by their fruits."
              • The death poll of Saddam Hussein's rule

                There's your problem. You're asking dead people.
            • You wish. The ORB poll two months that put the Iraqi civilian death toll since the invasion at a million and the Lancet study in October 2006 that put it at 650,000 are both talking about excess deaths; that is, above and beyond what they would have been under Hussein's rule.
              Even if you consider those numbers to be too high (and you'd better have a good reason for believing so besides not wanting to believe them), there's absolutely no denying the fact that the civilian death rates have skyrocketted since
        • "along with various reports of the violence at an all time low since the war "

          Simply not true. It has dropped to the level of violence we experienced in 2005 so that's good.
        • Wow, after 5 years and almost a Trillion pissed away into the sand, things are improving slightly! Yeah, take that terrorists! Fuck with the big bad USA and 5 years later we might actually get something done! I feel for those who were already in when this idiotic aggressive invasion took place. Those who enlisted after? Tough shit on them for supporting an evil agenda and being too stupid to realize that they were being lied to. We shoulda cleaned up in Afghanistan, gone home and secured our borders,

          • If this 'terrorist threat' was as serious as the government and their military cheerleaders say it is, why isn't there conscription?

            I'll have to check, but I don't think we have that until after we're researched Barracks and Monarchy.

          • You know, those guys signed up to be called on when a disaster hits their home state. You know, like those tornadoes and hurricanes that hit and we have no resources for now.

            • You know, like those tornadoes and hurricanes that hit and we have no resources for now.

              Yeah those tanks and anti-aircraft weapons they give the national guard are real effective against floods and tornadoes.

              Idiot.

          • Re:It's not a war, and they volunteered for it. (Score:4, Insightful)

            by saider (177166) on Thursday November 08 2007, @03:38PM (#21285839)
            Because this conflict was not to secure America, but to enrich the already-rich Americans with connections to politics.

            I don't think it was started with this in mind, although those people did profiteer off of the war.

            I believe this was a president, full of hubris, who thought that he could force democracy upon Iraq, and then use that as leverage to "solve" the middle east problem. He viewed himself as some great savior who would liberate them from dictators and be a celebrated hero (there is an interview of him stating this somewhere out there).

            This war in Iraq was started for vanity, not profits.

            • Wow, an insightful comment connected to Iraq. I was about to propose some sort of neo-Godwin's Rule pertaining to Iraq too.

              I think you absolutely right, the war is proof of the old adage about what the path to hell is paved with.

              I've noticed that most of the anti-war crowd like to turn the world into some episode of Captain Planet, or any other cartoon, with definite villains out there doing conscious evil. I can see them picturing Dick Cheney wearing a metal gauntlet, petting his cat, saying "Next time inspector Liberty, next time", and flying away in the White House. I guess it is an easier world view, than having to contemplate that our leaders are just overly idealistic men, no different than us in their foibles, and just as prone to hubris as the next.

              Iraq is a complex beast, and not prone to simple logic or characterizations (as are most things).

              • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

                by replicant108 (690832)
                I think you absolutely right, the war is proof of the old adage about what the path to hell is paved with.

                Would we be so quick to ascribe "good intentions" to the perpetrators of this travesty if they were foreigners?

                Did Russia invade Afghanistan out of "good intentions"?

                It seems that the Golden Rule of the western media is that the bigger the crime, the more pure our intentions were.
                • Would we be so quick to ascribe "good intentions" to the perpetrators of this travesty if they were foreigners?

                  Actually, yes. I think most people who do evil actions do so with the best of intentions, American or not. Yes, I can point to some exceptions, serial killers, perhaps the portion of evangelicals who want to bring on the end of the world, etc... But I am a firm believer in Hanna Arndt's idea of the "banality of evil".

                  The problem is that people get stuck in their ideology, and it becomes more rea

            • I believe this was a president, full of hubris, [...]

              My main problem with this theory is that it presumes that the President was the prime mover in this plan.

          • Why didn't we have 500,000 men in Iraq? Because Former President William Jefferson Clinton cut the legs out from under the Army and other armed forces so there were not enough people to do that.

            Could the US have instituted a draft and built the military back up? Sure. In about five years.

            Watch the president after Hillary. There will be a sudden awakening that we need to spend more on the armed forces and it will be like 1981 all over again. Carter did the same thing and when he needed the military it w
            • So let me get this right:

              If fewer of our troops die than on D-Day, an occupation that results in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians is right, get with the program and STFU. Much improved medical technology and procedure means that many more troops are living with horrific injuries that would have died in World War 2 - never mind that.

              If the majority of the American public were whipped up into a war frenzy, you should join in on the five minute hate, even though the facts are out there and the

              • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

                by Kazrath (822492)
                I like how you try spin it into meaning that America is killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. You do realize that we are not forcing dumbasses to strap bombs to their chests walk into a market and detonate. This shit was happening before we even stepped foot into Iraq it just was not in the news. Now these religious factions just have a way of justifying these horrendous acts they are inflicting on the civilians.
                • No, Iraq is not the scene of terrorists with bombs causing all the damage we've seen. You're buying into a selective analysis meant to blame those foreign devils for the state of their country, the same as those who have been taking this "white man's burden" style of intervention into the third world have always done.

                  You do realize that when mostly you're shooting a missile from an airplane into a building where a suspected "terrorist" is, you're going to get a lot of casualties right? You may argue that

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by vux984 (928602)
          Maybe you should check the news about our failures more often.

          I think we've been here before. Once bitten twice shy and all that.
          Indeed, this press release, for example is *very* encouraging:

          http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/05/20030501-15.html [whitehouse.gov]

          I'm sure glad its almost over... again.
        • Well, I guess if a Washington Post article and an article from a militarty website say all is going great in Iraq, who am I to argue?? Obviously those are both completely bias-free sites... (insert joke about "liberal media" here)
        • We already lost in Iraq. We lost in Iraq in 2003, when after initial military success it turned out we had no plan. As to proving who was right, I think this is as good of a time as any. A stupid decision to invade was made. People behind this decision are still in power. They press on with their stupid policies and rhetoric. You just propose we pull together and clean up their shit. I don't think so.

          I see it as my duty to criticize, berate, insult and generally annoy anyone who in any way supports, impleme

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