No, I think they had good reason to do what they did. Not at all. "A governmental entity may require the disclosure by a provider of electronic communication service of the contents of a wire or electronic communication...only pursuant to a warrant issued using the procedures described in the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure" But they DIDN'T disclose the CONTENTS of the communication service. What the law protected them agains was CIVIL suits (and you can sue for anything) which also have a lower threshold of proof. Which the Congress agreed with. Yes, because the phone companies DON'T store the actual communications, so they couldn't have turned them over. On the contrary, the idea that the NSA gives a flying fuck about you is what I find hilarious, in the EXTREME. Arthur
Heh, I just noticed that leopold99 quietly left the thread. I'll discuss this with anyone else btw. I'm just done with this one troll for now.
So do I - hence the obvious conclusion that they had, and have, a lot to hide. They broke the law, FISA - that's the physical, established, factual record admitted by everyone. Congress passed new law that retroactively bailed them out - also physical fact, in the agreed public record. You cannot sue for anything, and in particular cannot win a lawsuit without evidence and reason. A lower threshold of proof is not no proof required. The biggest difference between civil suit and criminal prosecution here is that civil suits did not need the efforts of the Justice Department to prosecute. W&Co could prevent its own famously corrupted Justice Department from prosecuting its own government allies and fellow officials (possibly its own agents), but had no such heavy control over every judge and legal firm in the country - and they had to keep that stuff out of the courts. Who said we were only worried about what the phone company collected itself for its own records? Not an issue here. Nobody is entertaining any such idea except you.
Nope FISA laws apply to the govt getting warrants, it says nothing about the legality of Telecom companies releasing Log Data. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Act Arthur
I've said several times now, since that first link to it, that the issue I've been discussing is the NSA Call Database which does NOT include any actual calls. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_call_database Arthur
BTW, Smith vs. Maryland is a whole truck of baloney in its own merit. If SCOTUS can rule that: they can use the same reasoning to say that any unencrypted e-mail, chat and voip communication does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy, since the person sends the communication to the ISP so that they can transmit it. And thus, they gain warrantless access to all unencrypted digital communication in the country. That is ridiculous. But then, it's what I've come to expect from this corrupt system.
Nope. While the number dialed is needed for processing by the 3rd party and the header of the email is needed for processing, (The "pen register" data that makes up the NSA Call DB) there is no processing required by the 3rd party for the actual message, and so there is in fact a reasonable expectation of privacy for the CONTENT of voice, email and VOIP messages. So why stay if you don't like it? There are flights every day that will take you back to Brazil. Arthur
The current definition of what is private and what isn't lies at the whim of a group of old guys in Washington. It doesn't matter what anyone else thinks. LITTLE ARTHUR! That is a very personal question! My gawd I;m blushing now. I'll give you a personal answer: none of your fucking business you twat.
No, it doesn't matter what you think (which is good because based on your post 247 you clearly did not understand their ruling in Smith vs. Maryland). But even if you couldn't understand it, the ruling was not done on a whim. It's based on the considered deliberation and after hearing all the arguments pro/con by the Supreme Court. And of course, if the Congress doesn't agree (voice of the people) they can write new law. Arthur
Why yes of course, everything that the powers of this country do is done with great consideration and thought and under the most solid legal foundations. I don't know where my had has been for the past 250 posts... jeez what was I thinking.
Your repeated attempts to limit the discussion to exclude the greater crimes of the Executive Branch have been noted, and rejected. You have no such information as you claim, you are as ignorant as the rest of the public of what W&Co did with their FISA-violating access to everybody's phone lines and email accounts and so forth. We are talking about the abuses of the Executive Branch under the auspices of the Patriot Act, including its apparent wiretapping of US citizens under various bogus excuses. And those laws were broken, by W&Co, systematically and repeatedly - that is why new, retroactive law had to be passed, as an emergency measure, to help block various lawsuits by various victims of illegal snooping.