http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/06/mobile-phone-nu.html

The potential law suits … would bankrupt these telecommunication companies. That would result in thousands having to find new work, destroying millions, if not billions, in investor value and potentially wreaking havoc on our telec. infrastructure.

Cry me a river. If we let companies break the law becuase Wall Street rewards it, why bother pretending that we have any law in the first place?

WSJ ran a big expose on the NSA data-hoover project yesterday. You can read it here: http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB120511973377523845.html

According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records. The NSA receives this so-called “transactional” data from other agencies or private companies, and its sophisticated software programs analyze the various transactions for suspicious patterns. Then they spit out leads to be explored by counterterrorism programs across the U.S. government, such as the NSA’s own Terrorist Surveillance Program, formed to intercept phone calls and emails between the U.S. and overseas without a judge’s approval when a link to al Qaeda is suspected.

Your own government is spying on you. Spying on me. They’re breaking the law. And you expect me to feel sorry for the schmucks at AT&T who are helping them get away with it?

The Hepting and ACLU complaints are there, along with congressional testimony, issues briefings, items from the Center for National Security Studies, Morton Halperin, the ABA, and a couple of articles I wrote bundled with other coverage from National Journal (Shane Harris), MSNBC and USA Today. There are also a couple of important Congressional Research Service reports as well.

File links are all filenames only (relative links), so you can download and unzip into any directory for local or lan use.

The collection is here:

thewall.civiblog.org/rsf/nsa.html

I hope You find this collection useful.

Cheers,

-dcm

Doesn’t seem so clear cut to me.

The issue really right now between the House and the Senate, as far as I can tell, the biggest issue is retroactive liability protection, and in their op-ed they just had a passing glance to that issue. But it is one of the biggest sticking points, because at the end of the day if we don’t have the companies helping us, then we won’t have a program.

I think that the word “corporatocracy” fits nicely here. Or fascism, you feel like being a “tin-foil-hat-wearer”.

The Bush administration has used state secrets privilege to cover up just about everything. If that doesn’t work, they just destroy documents like the CIA did with its torture tapes. If people whistleblow, they are either silenced or jailed. Even when individuals decide that they will take the punishment for whistleblowing in order to get information to the public, the press won’t cover it!!!

See the Sibel Edmonds situation if you want to see a high profile example.

We’ve got an institutional problem here, folks.

It appears they were paid handsomely. Comcast charged $1000 to begin a wiretap and $750 per month for each additional month. Where I live, basic cable costs about $20/month- so ignoring the 4th amendment is apparently much better for the balance sheet.

And there are hints that it was a carrot-and-stick arrangement. Ralph Nacchio, the CEO of the only major US telecom known to have refused to cooperate with the NSA’s demands, was recently prosecuted by the USDOJ for insider trading. In his trial, Nacchio claimed that the prosecution was politically-driven retaliation against him and his company. Nacchio’s defense depended on classified documents that supposedly show the government targeted him because he stood up for his customer’s privacy rights.