NSA Case Becomes Lawyer Junket
By Ryan Singel
Wired News, via Truthout
Friday 17 November 2006
San Francisco - Forty-eight lawsuits against the nation's largest telecommunications companies for alleged participation in a warrantless government surveillance program had their first day all together in court Friday, in a courtroom packed with more than two dozen lawyers for the government, the companies and civil liberties groups.
The class-action lawsuits accuse BellSouth, Cingular Wireless, Sprint, MCI, Verizon, AT&T and even cable provider Comcast of violating various privacy and fair business laws for allegedly collaborating with the government's warrantless eavesdropping on Americans' overseas phone calls, domestic phone logs and internet usage. Together, the suits seek millions in damages.
A group of judges known as the Multidistrict Litigation Panel ordered all the lawsuits sent here in August to be heard by Chief Judge Vaughn Walker, who'd been hearing an early lawsuit over the surveillance filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program, revealed in December 2005 by The New York Times, has been acknowledged by the Bush administration, which says it targets calls to and from the United States from overseas when one party has a suspected relationship to a terrorist group. The administration says the president's wartime powers allow the program to operate outside the nation's surveillance laws, which require that wiretaps, even of suspected terrorists, be explicitly authorized by a judge.
Government lawyers have attempted with some success to have legal challenges to the surveillance thrown out on the grounds that they could reveal state secrets, but in San Francisco, Walker danced around that assertion in EFF's case against AT&T.
The libertarian-leaning, Republican-appointed Walker refused to dismiss that case in a landmark ruling in July, saying that the program was no longer secret since the government had admitted it existed and "public disclosures by the government and AT&T indicate that AT&T is assisting the government to implement some kind of surveillance program."
(The rest is here.)
Wired News, via Truthout
Friday 17 November 2006
San Francisco - Forty-eight lawsuits against the nation's largest telecommunications companies for alleged participation in a warrantless government surveillance program had their first day all together in court Friday, in a courtroom packed with more than two dozen lawyers for the government, the companies and civil liberties groups.
The class-action lawsuits accuse BellSouth, Cingular Wireless, Sprint, MCI, Verizon, AT&T and even cable provider Comcast of violating various privacy and fair business laws for allegedly collaborating with the government's warrantless eavesdropping on Americans' overseas phone calls, domestic phone logs and internet usage. Together, the suits seek millions in damages.
A group of judges known as the Multidistrict Litigation Panel ordered all the lawsuits sent here in August to be heard by Chief Judge Vaughn Walker, who'd been hearing an early lawsuit over the surveillance filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program, revealed in December 2005 by The New York Times, has been acknowledged by the Bush administration, which says it targets calls to and from the United States from overseas when one party has a suspected relationship to a terrorist group. The administration says the president's wartime powers allow the program to operate outside the nation's surveillance laws, which require that wiretaps, even of suspected terrorists, be explicitly authorized by a judge.
Government lawyers have attempted with some success to have legal challenges to the surveillance thrown out on the grounds that they could reveal state secrets, but in San Francisco, Walker danced around that assertion in EFF's case against AT&T.
The libertarian-leaning, Republican-appointed Walker refused to dismiss that case in a landmark ruling in July, saying that the program was no longer secret since the government had admitted it existed and "public disclosures by the government and AT&T indicate that AT&T is assisting the government to implement some kind of surveillance program."
(The rest is here.)
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