Eleven years and counting: EFF scores a major victory in its NSA mass surveillance suit

[friendly_iconoclast]

Source: BoingBoing

In 2005, a former AT&T engineer named Mark Klein walked into the Electronic Frontier Foundation's offices and revealed that he had helped the phone company build a secret NSA surveillance outpost at the Folsom Street switching station, through which AT&T was helping the US government conduct mass, warrantless, domestic surveillance.

EFF has been in court with the US government ever since, fighting round after round of attempts by DoJ lawyers to get the case thrown out, usually on the basis that since all the evidence of NSA wrongdoing was secret, EFF couldn't proceed. The Snowden revelations helped some, but it's been touch and go for more than a decade.

Now, Judge Jeffrey White has ruled in Jewel, a case that's been underway since 2008, and given EFF leave to conduct discovery on the NSA, forcing the agency to produce documents that will answer key questions about their program of mass domestic spying.


This marks the first time a party has been allowed to gather factual evidence from the NSA in a case involving the agency’s warrantless surveillance. The government had fought all our requests to proceed with this lawsuit, arguing that the state secrets privilege protects it against both discovery and liability. Judge White previously rejected that argument for our statutory claims under the Wiretap Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and the Stored Communications Act. This ruling affirms Judge White’s previous decision and opens the door for discovery.



Read more: https://boingboing.net/2016/02/19/eleven-years-and-counting-eff.html

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More here at the EFF site:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/big-victory-judge-pushes-jewel-v-nsa-forward

[cstanleytech]

1. It aint over until the appeals have been run out and you can almost bet that the NSA

will take this all the way to the supreme court if they can and the cynical side of me doubts the majority of scotus will side against the NSA.

[JDPriestly]

2. If they don't decide against the NSA this time, they will in the future.

The Fourth Amendment requires very specific information for legal searches. The government has over-reached, way over-reached, and sooner or later the law will catch up with them.

The spirit of the Constitution is alive and well, and even the conservative Court prior to Scalia's death suggested that the government should be careful not to over-reach in its gathering of personal data and information. And that was with regard to the collection of the kind of information that was collected in pen registers prior to the internet.

This almost universal gathering of data on communications is an utterly hideous violation of the human right to privacy.

They didn't even do this in the Soviet Union or East Germany.

How can anyone think it is OK. It isn't.

[cstanleytech]

7. Not disagreeing with you and hopefully my cynical part is wrong and the court will not

shield the NSA but then again considering some of the really shitty rulings by the court like citizens united you never can tell with them.

[Android3.14]

3. Now this is going to be interesting

[cantbeserious]

4. Thank You For Sharing This Good News

eom

[Bangbangdem]

5. Hahaha! What a mistake to try this in San Francisco!

Hahahaha!

[L. Coyote]

8. That's where the series of tubes main trunk lines are.

The routing determines where you have to splice in to duplicate the optical stream to capture everything transmitted and send it to a destination.

[Bangbangdem]

10. Just being cheeky

[L. Coyote]

6. Deja DU: Are ALL COMMUNICATIONS routed overseas to circumvent US law and the Constitution?

L. Coyote Original message Fri Nov-09-07

Are ALL COMMUNICATIONS routed overseas to circumvent US law and the Constitution?

I was told years ago that ALL fiber optic communication traffic was routed overseas so that "everything" was moved outside the protections of the law and Constitution and ANYTHING could be monitored. I thought the idea quite fantastic even though it came from a very reliable source that would know exactly such things. Then, the story of the fiber optic splitters hit my radar. I now see now how easily exactly that, routing ALL COMMUNICATIONS overseas, was accomplished.

Is that Bush's and the Telecom's HUGE crime hidden and covered-up behind this story?

If the telecoms get immunity, will it aid in covering up Bush's crime.
ABSOLUTELY! That is why it is so important to the Rs! Support = obstruction of justice.

Have we arrived at the point in the history of the Bushco junta where
laws passed and people nominated are part of crimes of obstructing justice?

AT&T Whistleblower: Telecom Immunity Is A Cover-Up
By Spencer Ackerman - Nov 7, 2007
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/004662.php


Earlier today we flagged that Mark Klein, who uncovered a secret surveillance room run by the NSA while employed as a San Francisco-based technician for AT&T, is in Washington to lobby against granting retroactive legal immunity .....

[GliderGuider]

9. David keeps swingin' his sling against Goliath.

He may have landed one of his shots.

[Blue_Tires]

11. But there's no suit against AT+T?

[L. Coyote]

12. Retroactive immunity law.

Obama voted for that law, not?