Judge: No American companies challenged phone record orders. You paid them to sell you out.

[Brandon Krause]

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/09/17/fisa-
judge-no-challenges-to-phone-records-orders/2829357/

WASHINGTON (AP) — A newly declassified opinion from the
government's secret surveillance court says no company that has
received an order to turn over bulk telephone records has
challenged the directive.

The opinion by Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Judge
Claire Eagan, made public Tuesday, spells out her reasons for
reauthorizing the phone records collection "of specified
telephone service providers" for three months.

The collection program, which the government says is authorized
under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, was disclosed by former
National Security Agency systems analyst Edward Snowden,
provoking a heated debate over civil liberties.

Eagan had asked that her Aug. 29 opinion be made public "because
of the public interest in this matter," and on Tuesday, the
presiding judge of the FISA Court, U.S. District Judge Reggie
Walton, ordered that the opinion be published. Portions of the
opinion were blacked out.

"To date, no holder of records who has received an order to
produce bulk telephony metadata has challenged the legality of
such an order," wrote Eagan, who also serves on the U.S.
District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma, to which
she was appointed by President George W. Bush. "Indeed, no
recipient of any Section 215 order has challenged the legality
of such an order, despite the explicit statutory mechanism for
doing so."

She wrote that under Section 215 Congress provided for judicial
review of FISA Court orders — first to the FISA Court of Review
and, ultimately, to the U.S. Supreme Court. That provides for a
"substantial and engaging adversarial process to test the
legality of this court's orders under Section 215."

Eagan also concluded that the collection of phone records does
not violate the Constitution's Fourth Amendment, which prohibits
unreasonable search and seizure.

Verizon and T-Mobile declined to comment on the opinion. AT&T
and Sprint didn't return messages seeking comment.

The names of the companies the government is seeking the phone
records from is blacked out in both the opinion and order.

In another NSA data-collection program, PRISM, Yahoo is seeking
to declassify a 2008 secret court order that required the
company to turn over customer data to the government. In a
filing with the court this year, Yahoo said disclosure of the
opinion and briefs would allow the company to "demonstrate that
it objected strenuously to the directives that are now the
subject of debate, and objected at every stage of the
proceeding," but that its objections were overruled. The Justice
Department said last week it would declassify parts of that
order.

Eagan also stressed in her opinion that prior to Congress
reauthorizing Section 215 in 2011, the executive branch provided
the intelligence committees of both the House and the Senate
with detailed information about how the FISA Court was approving
bulk telephone collection under the section. She said the
executive branch worked with congressional committees to make
sure that each member of Congress knew, or had the opportunity
to know, how Section 215 was being implemented under the court's
orders.

In a statement, Director of National Intelligence James R.
Clapper said the opinion "affirms that the bulk telephony
metadata collection is both lawful and constitutional. The
release of this opinion is consistent with the president's call
for more transparency on these valuable intelligence programs."

But Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil
Liberties Union, said that as a defense of the phone records
collection program, the opinion is "completely unpersuasive."

 

[Siri Cruz]

Post by Brandon Krause
WASHINGTON (AP) — A newly declassified opinion from the
government's secret surveillance court says no company that has
received an order to turn over bulk telephone records has
challenged the directive.

Are you surprised? Why should the businesses spend money on legal fees on a
matter that is irrelevant to their business? They would only fight if they
decide to make some kind of moral stand (irrelevant to making a prfit) or the
cases were publicised so that they were subject to customer anger (but they're
not).

Once the Supremes decided that customers have no control over business records
about them, all the customer information businesses hold became available to the
government without customers having any standing in court to complain. Congress
could amend the law, of course, but they won't because it's more popular to
catch a dozen terrorists instead of protecting hundreds of millions of innocent
people.

There are a lot of similar things.

- Smart cards could be used to hold money that is as untraceable as cash with
the money stored on the card without needing to connect to a bank for each
transaction.

- Smart cards could carry encrypted information such as driver licenses, gun or
ammunition licenses, with no central depository of information that can be used
for other information.

- Smart cards could carry a variety of uncorrelated identifiers which do not
have to be memorised rather than force everyone to use an SSN as the sole
identifier reducing the risk of identity theft.

- Without export control of cryptography hardware cell phones, PCs, and the rest
could carry robust protection against identity theft and eavesdropping.


The real question is what is more important: privacy and security for the vast
majority of law abiding Americans or to make life slightly more difficult for
the much smaller number of criminals. The people have spoken: they want the
latter.