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Red
7 Apr 2009, 01:26pm
After the left whining about Bush intruding on our privacy it's good to see Obama changing Bush's worn out policy. Oh wait, he isn't, damn.

Good change and transparency.




Government opts for secrecy in wiretap suit
Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 7, 2009

(04-06) 15:26 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- The Obama administration is again invoking government secrecy in defending the Bush administration's wiretapping program, this time against a lawsuit by AT&T customers who claim federal agents illegally intercepted their phone calls and gained access to their records.

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Disclosure of the information sought by the customers, "which concerns how the United States seeks to detect and prevent terrorist attacks, would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security," Justice Department lawyers said in papers filed Friday in San Francisco.

Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a lawyer for the customers, said Monday the filing was disappointing in light of the Obama presidential campaign's "unceasing criticism of Bush-era secrecy and promise for more transparency."

In a 2006 lawsuit, the AT&T plaintiffs accused the company of allowing the National Security Agency to intercept calls and e-mails and inspect records of millions of customers without warrants or evidence of wrongdoing.

The suit followed President George W. Bush's acknowledgement in 2005 that he had secretly authorized the NSA in 2001 to monitor messages between U.S. residents and suspected foreign terrorists without seeking court approval, as required by a 1978 law.

Congress passed a new law last summer permitting the surveillance after Bush allowed some court supervision, the extent of which has not been made public. The law also sought to grant immunity to AT&T and other telecommunications companies from suits by customers accusing them of helping the government spy on them.

Nearly 40 such suits from around the nation, all filed after Bush's 2005 disclosure, have been transferred to San Francisco and are pending before Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker. He is now reviewing a constitutional challenge to last year's immunity law, which the Obama administration is defending.

Walker is also considering a challenge to the surveillance program by the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a now-defunct charity that was inadvertently given a government document in 2004, reportedly showing that its lawyers had been wiretapped during an investigation that landed the group on the government's terrorist list.

The Obama administration is also opposing that suit and has challenged Walker's order to let Al-Haramain's lawyers examine the still-classified surveillance document.

The administration's new filing asks Walker to dismiss a second suit filed in September by AT&T customers that sought to sidestep the telecommunications immunity law by naming only the government, Bush and other top officials as defendants.

Like the earlier suit, the September case relies on a former AT&T technician's declaration that he saw equipment installed at the company's San Francisco office to allow NSA agents to copy all incoming e-mails. The plaintiffs' lawyers say the declaration, and public statements by government officials, revealed a "dragnet" surveillance program that indiscriminately scooped up messages and customer records.

The Justice Department said Friday that government agents monitored only communications in which "a participant was reasonably believed to be associated with al Qaeda or an affiliated terrorist organization." But proving that the surveillance program did not sweep in ordinary phone customers would require "disclosure of highly classified NSA intelligence sources and methods," the department said.

Individual customers cannot show their messages were intercepted, and thus have no right to sue, because all such information is secret, government lawyers said. They also said disclosure of whether AT&T took part in the program would tell the nation's enemies "which channels of communication may or may not be secure."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/06/BARP16TJOQ.DTL&tsp=1


Not surprising though given his voting record on this.

Sigh, I'm not even angered by his blatant hypocrisy as much as I am by Obama voters willingness to sit there and grin like he isn't spitting in their, no, ALL our faces. He's more a politician than Bush was. He's even MORE of "politics as usual" than anybody else.

LegalSmash
7 Apr 2009, 01:33pm
If you keep company with possible terrorists.

Red
7 Apr 2009, 01:35pm
Let me get this right, first of all:

Is this basically people listening in on phone calls and reading emails?

International calls/correspondence with suspected terrorists etc.

The same wiretapping that all the media and liberals kept calling "illegal/warrantless wiretapping" that Obama is now endorsing again.

Yay hypocrites!

Red
7 Apr 2009, 01:44pm
The fact that they're doing it USED to be controversial when Bush was in charge, now it's not.

What's controversial (to those of us who didn't just vote on someone based on "Hope and change" and are turning a blind eye to everything he's doing that goes against all his speeches during his campaign) is that he's basically being a spineless hypocrite, the latter.

LegalSmash
7 Apr 2009, 02:00pm
Havok,

To simplify the issue, in 1978 and during the period plus or minus 20 years, a series of requirements were handed down by the US supreme Court and Legislature requiring certain standards of evidence in order to request wiretaps, keyloggers, penregisters, and other monitoring devices in the pursuit of justice and domestic tranquility. In order to use these "extreme" measures, the requesting entity (ie. cops and government) had to fill out a very long, very comprehensive form, which we in the legal field call a "super search warrant", and it has to be approved by a specific judge according to jurisdiction, and for a limited period of time.

The federal government has it worse, because they must ask federal judges to approve these very long, very detailed requests, and it takes fucking forever, because fed ct judges are too busy trying to determine what to do about homosexuals, claims against obama's birth certificate, and pointless inquiries as to whether a teacher's utterance of the term "jesus christ" when confronted by an athiest handicapped minority student toting a gun to school because he was "cyber bullied'.

This being the case, after the great plane attack of 9/11, the Bush administration presented a piece of legislation, the patriot act, which CONGRESS APPROVED IN RECORD NUMBERS, which allowed the federal government to bypass certain, but not all requirements to the very stringent super search warrant requirements, and streamlining the process, so we may have a chance to catch Ali and Yusef talking about blowing up an ice cream parlor on hebrew night as opposed to just picking up the smoldering pieces of jew and watching the VHS/Beta video al-qaeda makes afterwards.

Certain people, usually the same ones bringing cases about homosexuality and minorities decided to go apeshit because it infringed their alleged right to use the federally/state constructed and paid for telecommunication system to talk to their shady relatives... They decried the practice as unconstitutional, despite the fact that the constitutional guarantee of privacy was made up out of the first 10 amendments by a very liberal court in the
1960's and in no part of the constitution does the term "internet", "email", or "terrorist" appear.

Basically these people are constitutional expansionists in a certain vein, regarding things that don't really fall under federal jurisdiction as per the constitution and other founding documents of this country, such as abortion law, family law, "privacy" and determining prevailing property rights, but are extreme strict contructionists when it comes to their definition of other concepts, such as attempting to claim that the "right to bear arms" means the right to arm the animals, and that no guns are allowed but for a regulated militia.

Red is commenting on the fact that the same people that voted for obama (a good chunk) are not complaining that Obama continues to use the very useful, very effective patriot act to safeguard the nation, despite his constituents' railing against the procedure under bush as the political equivalent to raping and murdering newborns.

Its an issue of Irony... like Anne Frank being really good at hide and go seek, Most of the time.

Italian Jew
7 Apr 2009, 02:08pm
WOOOH! Fire alarm in mah building while typing this, but anywho...

There are more fact than are being revealed. I hope it was something important because I am disappointed that this hasn't changed yet. The DoJ sees something endangering or necessary with this and convinced Obama of the "greater good" that would come from this. I don't see it, but like I said, I am disappointed at this and I hope there is a very damn good reason for it. I doubt it was because of a change of heart.

LegalSmash
7 Apr 2009, 02:11pm
WOOOH! Fire alarm in mah building while typing this, but anywho...

There are more fact than are being revealed. I hope it was something important because I am disappointed that this hasn't changed yet. The DoJ sees something endangering or necessary with this and convinced Obama of the "greater good" that would come from this. I don't see it, but like I said, I am disappointed at this and I hope there is a very damn good reason for it. I doubt it was because of a change of heart.

Sadly, the DOJ is a very politicized section of the executive, they may be made up of lawyers, but they are not judiciary. The problem in this country begins when the judiciary is politicized, and ever since 1800, it has been sadly.