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Banned
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Originally Posted by aceventura3
1) The buck stops with Bush. If the law was broken he should be held accountable.
2) Telecoms acted in good faith.
3) It is reasonable to review phone records involving calls to/from known terrorists.
4) No evidence was produced showing anyone was actually damaged.
5) The litigation would be excessively costly with class action lawsuits.
6) The only real winners would be trial attorneys.
7) The costs of litigation would be passed on to American consumers.
8) US telecoms are already behind international competition, litigation would divert resources from investment.
9) The original legislation lacked clarity.
10) I would have done the same as Bush, given the circumstances.
Wow, amazing. But, you were involved in many of the threads were we went back and forth on this.
Wanna predict what I am going to say when Obama, as President, is going to commit to troops in Iraq through his entire first term?
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Do you think "the terrorists" have been busy enough, in one recent year, to justify this level of "monitoring"?
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http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...l#previouspost
FBI Recorded 27 Million FISA 'Sessions' in 2006
By Ryan Singel EmailDecember 19, 2007 | 7:36:32 PMCategories: Privacy, Sunshine and Secrecy
At the end of 2006, the FBI's Telecommunications Intercept and Collection Technology Unit compiled an end-of-the-year report touting its accomplishments to management, a report that was recently unearthed via an open government request from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Strikingly, the report said that the FBI's software for recording telephone surveillance of suspected spies and terrorists intercepted 27,728,675 sessions.
Twenty-seven million is a staggering number given that the FBI only got 2,176 FISA court orders http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/fisa/2006rept.pdf in 2006 from a secret spy court using the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
According to the math that means each court order resulted in 12,742 "sessions," all in regards to phone, not internet, surveillance.
FISA watchers have long wondered whether FISA warrants covered more than one person. Knowing how many calls or text messages the FBI captured could add a piece to the puzzle.
Unfortunately, nothing in the documents turned over yet to the Electronic Frontier Foundation explain what a session is. ...
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The only reason we even know the limited info above, ace, is because of the litigation attempted against the telecomms. Are you incurious and trusting of your government, or indifferent about vigilance over the status of your rights, the respect the government demonstrates, in how it recognizes and preserves them? Why would you defer to the government....what is up with that? When did the earn your trust, or do you consider whether they earn it, or not?
ace, the buck does not "stop with Bush". The telecomms broke the law, as it existed at the time. The government has also broken the law, but different law.... the telecomms and the government had different obligations and exposure, under the law, because, in 1986, congress envisioned that the government would attempt to get information from telecomms without following the law.
People have been damaged....what is your right to be "secure in your papers...in your hone", worth to you, ace...do you value that right at all? "Secure" refers "unwarranted" government intrusion.... hence the term, "unwarranted"...without the legally required warrants....law in force at the time of the lawbreaking, unless a reasonable expectation that a massive data mining "Op", circa 2005, was justified by an "emergency level", threat to our domestic security. the telecomms are not even trying to assert that in court, as a defense....
Quote:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...165_nsa13.html
Telecoms may face trouble over phone records
By Seattle Times news services
Former Qwest Chairman and CEO Joseph Nacchio
WASHINGTON — Phone companies that shared their call records with the government may have violated federal law and could be on the hook for billions of dollars in civil liability, some of the nation's top experts in telecommunications law said Friday.
That's because Congress made it illegal 20 years ago for telephone companies and computer-service providers to turn over to the government records showing who their customers had dialed or e-mailed.
The information in those records enables U.S. intelligence agencies to track who calls whom and when, but does not include the contents of conversations.
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http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...-spy-cour.html
Secret Spy Court Repeatedly Questions FBI Wiretap Network
By Ryan Singel EmailJune 11, 2008 | 3:13:54 PMCategories: Surveillance
Does the FBI track cellphone users' physical movements without a warrant? Does the Bureau store recordings of innocent Americans caught up in wiretaps in a searchable database? Does the FBI's wiretap equipment store information like voicemail passwords and bank account numbers without legal authorization to do so?
That's what the nation's Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court wanted to know, in a series of secret inquiries in 2005 and 2006 into the bureau's counterterrorism electronic surveillance efforts, revealed for the first time in newly declassified documents.
The inquires are the first publicly known questioning of the FBI's post-9/11 surveillance activities by the secret court, which has historically approved nearly every wiretap application submitted to it. http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...-approved.html The court handles surveillance requests in counterterrorism and foreign espionage investigations. The inquiries add to questions surrounding how the FBI has used the broad powers handed to it by Congress in the 2001 USA Patriot Act, including the FBI's admitted abuse http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...suses_und.html of so-called National Security Letters to get stored telephone and financial records.
Among other things, the declassified documents reveal that lawyers in the FBI's Office of General Counsel and the Justice Department's Office of Intelligence Policy Review queried FBI technology officials in late July 2006 about cellphone tracking. The attorneys asked whether the FBI was obtaining and storing real-time cellphone-location data from carriers under a "pen register" court order that's normally limited to records of who a person called or was called by.
The internal inquiry seems to have preceded, and was likely prompted by, a secret court hearing on the matter days later. Kevin Bankston, a lawyer with Electronic Frontier Foundation, says the documents suggest that the nation's spy court shares the reluctance of federal criminal courts to turn everyday cellphones into tracking devices, in the absence of evidence that the target has done something wrong.
"I hope that this signals that the FISC, like many magistrate judges that handle law enforcement surveillance requests, is growing skeptical of the government's authority to conduct real-time cellphone tracking without probable cause," says Bankston.
In criminal cases, the government's attempts to get cellphone-tracking data without probable cause to believe the target has committed a crime were denied several times in 2005 by federal judges in New York and Texas.
According to the documents, which the EFF obtained in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, an FBI general counsel lawyer asked on July 21, 2006: "Can we at the collection end tell the equipment NOT to receive the cell site location information?"
The lawyer added a note of concern that phone companies might be sending along cell-site data even when they aren't asked for it. "Do we get it all or can we, when required, tell the equipment to not collect the cell-site location data?," the lawyer asked.
Separately, the secret court questioned if the FBI was using pen register orders to collect digits dialed after a call is made, potentially including voicemail passwords and account numbers entered into bank-by-phone applications.
Using a pen register order, the FBI can force a phone company to turn over records of who a person calls, or is called by, simply by asserting the information would be relevant to an investigation. But existing case law holds that those so-called "post-cut-through dialed digits" count as the content of a communication, and thus to collect that information, the FBI would need to get a full-blown wiretapping warrant based on probable cause.
The FBI's encrypted wiretapping backbone network, DCSNet, connects 37 FBI field offices, according to some documents. Other documents suggest the network now extends to 52 field offices, including locations in Alaska and Puerto Rico. This enhanced image is based on black-and-white FBI documents.
Colored photo-illustration: Frank Rodriguez
On August 7 2006, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly took the extraordinary step of ordering the FBI to report (.pdf) on how its sophisticated phone wiretapping system,http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/06.../0806_fisc.pdf known as Digital Collection System, handled those extra digits and whether it stored them in a centralized data-mining depository known as Telephone Application.
The documents (.pdf) http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/06...dd_survey1.pdf show that the majority of FBI offices surveyed internally were collecting that information without full-blown wiretap orders, especially in classified investigations. The documents also indicate that the information was being uploaded to the FBI's central repository for wiretap recordings and phone records, where analysts can data-mine the records for decades.
EFF's Bankston says it's clear that FBI offices had configured their digit-recording software, DCS 3000, to collect more than the law allows.....
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The law doesn't make it illegal for the government to ask for such records. Rather, it makes it illegal for phone companies to divulge them.
"I would not want to be the general counsel of one of these phone companies," said Orin Kerr, a George Washington University law professor and a former Justice Department lawyer who has worked on electronic surveillance.
In the first legal action to result from the disclosure that the National Security Agency may have obtained the calling records of tens of millions of Americans, two New Jersey public-interest lawyers filed a suit Friday demanding up to $5 billion from telecommunications giant Verizon.
Verizon and the nation's other major phone companies — AT&T and BellSouth — have neither acknowledged nor denied that they voluntarily turned over millions of records of customers' everyday phone calls after the Sept. 11 attacks. On Friday, the three companies issued carefully worded statements declaring their commitment to protecting consumer privacy and operating within the law.
Meanwhile, the former head of another communications company said through his lawyer that he refused to participate because he thought the program was illegal.
Qwest, a Baby Bell serving 15 million customers in Washington and 13 other Western states, was approached in the fall of 2001 to permit government access to its phone records, according to the attorney for Joseph Nacchio, Qwest's chairman and CEO at the time.
Nacchio refused to turn over the records because the government had failed to obtain a warrant or cross other legal hurdles to obtain the data, according to the lawyer, Herbert Stern.
NSA "intrusion"
Bruce Afran and Carl Mayer, the lawyers who filed the federal suit against Verizon on Friday, said they would consider filing suits against BellSouth and AT&T.
"This is almost certainly the largest single intrusion into American civil liberties ever committed by any U.S. administration," Afran said.
The suit seeks $1,000 in damages for each record improperly turned over to the NSA, or up to $5 billion in all. The law gives consumers the right to sue for violations of the act and allows them to recover a minimum of $1,000 for each violation.
"No warrants have been issued for the disclosure of such information, no suspicion of terrorist activity or other criminal activity has been alleged against the subscribers," the suit alleges.
Peter Swire, an Ohio State University law professor who was the Clinton administration's top adviser on privacy issues, said the 1986 Stored Communications Act forbids such a turnover to the government without a warrant or court order.
"If you've got 50 million people, that's potentially $50 billion," Swire said. "I can't figure out any defense here."
Few details were known about how the records program works or what useful information the NSA may have gleaned from the data.
Law narrowly defined
The law does allow phone companies to hand over records in emergencies, but that was defined very narrowly until recently. Disclosure was limited to cases in which the company "reasonably" believed there was an "immediate danger of death or serious physical injury" that disclosure might help prevent.
"If this was a program ongoing for several years, then it's hard to say that there was a continuing reasonable belief of immediate danger over the entire time," Kerr said on his Web log.
As part of its renewal of the Patriot Act in March, Congress softened the language to the point where new disclosures of phone records arguably might pass muster, Kerr said. Phone companies no longer have to have a "reasonable" belief that death or injury lurks, only a "good faith" belief. They also no longer have to believe that such a tragedy is "immediate."
The 1986 law was passed when cellphones and the Internet were emerging. Section 2702 of the law says these providers of "electronic communications ... shall not knowingly divulge a record or other information pertaining to a subscriber or customer ... to any government entity."
"It is simply illegal for a telephone company to turn over caller records without some form of legal process, such as a court order or a subpoena," said James Dempsey, a lawyer for the Center for Democracy and Technology in San Francisco.
The 1986 law "was Congress' effort to create a comprehensive privacy right and to apply it to all forms of electronic communications," said Dempsey, then a counsel to the House Judiciary Committee.
The legal situation
Both Kerr and Dempsey said it is hard to analyze the legal situation because neither the Bush administration nor any of the phone companies has explained the legal basis for divulging the records. Under the law as written, however, "it looks like the disclosure is not allowed," Kerr said.
"If they did not have a court order, this is clearly illegal," said Kate Martin, a lawyer and director of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington.
A separate provision of the law says the FBI director may demand "billing records of a person" if the director "certifies in writing" that these records are "relevant to an authorized investigation to protect against international terrorism." But Martin noted it applies only to the FBI, not the NSA. Moreover, it focuses on those linked to a criminal investigation.
Bush administration officials may have argued they faced a national emergency. Many Americans feared another terrorist attack within the United States, and officials were eager to quickly gather as much information as possible.
"You can see how they could say that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11," Dempsey said. "I don't understand how that could serve as a 'good-faith' defense for years afterward."
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Last edited by host; 06-23-2008 at 11:51 AM..
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