MercuryNews.com | 04/11/2006 | AT&T asks judge to order documents alleging wiretaps returned – Ever wonder why AT&T was allowed to re-form the way it has? The company plays ball. The customer can screw himself. And, of course, it’s all about the terrorists, right? But it’s still YOU they are monitoring.
So what is in these documents that they want back so badly?
Attorneys for AT&T have asked a federal judge to order a San Francisco civil liberties group to return “highly confidential” documents that allegedly show that the telecommunications giant provided detailed records of millions of its customers to a government intelligence agency.
In documents filed on Monday, AT&T’s attorneys also asked Judge Vaughn Walker to order the Electronic Frontier Foundation to refrain from referencing the documents in its lawsuit.
The EFF filed a lawsuit against AT&T in January alleging that AT&T had collaborated with the National Security Agency in a “massive and illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans’ communications.”
To all the people who trust the government to look after the little people over the corporations, let this be a lesson in reality. Politicians care about winning elections and bureaucrats care about doing their jobs and going home. Every once in a while you will get the odd idealistic “boy scout” mixed in with the rest of the pot.
The hole just keeps getting deeper and deeper for Bush. The worst part of it is the rest of the Republican party will be the ones to suffer during the mid-terms and 2008 elections. Unless the Administration quickly starts ackowledgeing its errors and making amends, John McCain will be begging the Democrats to take him in.
Didn’t Kennedy have the FBI wiretap Martin Luther King Jr.?
“Unless the Administration quickly starts ackowledgeing its errors and making amends” — Politicians admits errors? Boy are you asking for alot.
Actually, wiretapping Dr. King was the idea of J.Edgar Hoover. He hated King about as much as he hated the Kennedys.
“Wiretaps, which were initially approved by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, were maintained on Dr. King’s home telephone from October 1963 until mid-1965; ”
http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/churchfinalreportIIIb.htm
Hoover started COINTELPRO in 1956. Rarely were any of those activities “authorized”. That included bugging pretty much every leader in the civil rights movement.
In ’63, Kennedy authorized bugging King’s home and office — at Hoover’s request. The document you reference, axe, clearly states, “Attorney General Robert Kennedy approved an FBI request for permission to install wiretaps…” Even then, Hoover exceeded the provisions of that order by bugging King’s hotel rooms as he traveled the country.
Just because “legal” bugging started in 1963 — doesn’t excuse the reality of Hoover’s earlier efforts.
I was part of a successful class action suit against the FBI [among others] and SNETCo for illegal bugging. The class action was settled on behalf of over 2,000 plaintiffs [of the several thousand bugged] which included a world-class stiff named Joe Lieberman. He made the list as the president of the Yale Young Dems.
In fact, the neatest procedural tack taken by our lead attorney was to separate out each group of crooks — starting with the suit against the Telco. The provision of that victory was that they had to pick up the tab for the remainder of the class action.
We won every one.
Anyone ever noticed that the far left liberals and the far right kooks believe in huge government conspiracies led by their political opposites? And both the far left and far right love to whine about how bad everything is. Optimism lives in the sane middle ground of American society.
Uh, Douglas Griffiths: What does your post have to do with Dvorak’s? Or any of the other comments about Dr. King, or Hoover? Are you saying that this stuff didn’t/doesn’t happen or what? How does your brand of ‘sanity’ /’optimism’ preserve itself, with info from what sources? If ruling-class Democrats are ‘far-left’, what does that term mean, exactly, and what does that say about politcal philosophy in the US? Wow, your smugness and concision are coextensive.
I always figured the sudden popularity of thong underwear has something to do with fools who bray about the safe and sane middle. They spend so much of their conscious life sitting on the fence they end up liking the feeling.