San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T Tuesday, accusing the telecom giant of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in its massive and illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans’ communications.
The NSA program came to light in December, when the New York Times reported that the president had authorized the agency to intercept telephone and Internet communications inside the United States without the authorization of any court. Over the ensuing weeks, it became clear that the NSA program has been intercepting and analyzing millions of Americans’ communications, with the help of the country’s largest phone and Internet companies.
Reporting has also indicated that those same companies—and AT&T specifically—have given the NSA direct access to their vast databases of communications records, including information about whom their customers have phoned or emailed with in the past. And yet little has been accomplished by this illegal spying: recent reports have shown that the data from this wholesale surveillance has done little more than waste FBI resources on dead leads.
“The NSA program is apparently the biggest fishing expedition ever devised, scanning millions of ordinary Americans’ phone calls and emails for ’suspicious’ patterns, and it’s the collaboration of US telecom companies like AT&T that makes it possible,” said EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. “When the government defends spying on Americans by saying, ‘If you’re talking to terrorists we want to know about it,’ that’s not even close to the whole story.”
In the lawsuit, EFF alleges that AT&T, in addition to allowing the NSA direct access to the phone and Internet communications passing over its network, has given the government unfettered access to its over 300 terabyte “Daytona” database of caller information—one of the largest databases in the world.
Full statement here.
January 31st, 2006 at 5:50 pm
Frist.
Yes, I’m an idiot. Never again, I promise.
January 31st, 2006 at 5:52 pm
Being a customer of the company and thinking back on the many conversations on the phone and emails I have sent to friends and family discussing the many criminal activities of our current administration, I am surprised that I haven’t received a knock on the door from our friendly local FBI office. Many times during conversations on the phone we have joked about the fact that we used words like WMD, Bush, Hussein, Iraq, Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda and so on and wondered if we were ending up on some database located somewhere in or near Washington DC. Now I know, we did.
January 31st, 2006 at 6:00 pm
As someone who’s been involved in some activism, I assume someone is listening. On the other hand, I assume nobody cares about me. If they arrested everyone who had problems with the Bush Administration, we’d have the largest prison system in the world, with ten times the incarceration rate than Canada or Europe…
Oh, we already do? Well, never mind.
January 31st, 2006 at 6:06 pm
I was only semi-serious about being arrested, but with the state of the country right now and our civil liberties being flushed down the drain at an alarming rate, you never know.
January 31st, 2006 at 6:19 pm
Given that I have family in the UK… And that I am critical of the President… and that I called my family immediately after the bombings of the London Underground and used words like “bomb” and “al-qaeda” I would not be surprised to learn that I have been/am being watched.
And I haven’t done anything wrong.
Z.
January 31st, 2006 at 6:19 pm
Seems to me this means most NSA guys sit around looking at porn all day.
January 31st, 2006 at 7:11 pm
I think I am going to place a signature on my emails that just has random terror-related terms (e.g. ‘bomb,’ ‘Afghanistan,’ ‘plot,’ ‘Al Qaeda,’ ‘The President is a total asshat,’ etc.) and start emailing random things to my Republican friends in hopes that they pass it along with the terror buzzwords on them. Hell, I might even make the text white so they don’t even see that it’s there. I’ll send it to everyone. I’ll suggest others do it. I would like to see how the people who ‘have nothing to hide’ behave when Mr. NSA shows up at their door asking questions. Or maybe it will start to pollute the system with so much noise that it becomes inoperable.
Just a thought. Join in if you want. I, like a few above, have contacts overseas and am critical of the government, so I assume I’m already being looked at
January 31st, 2006 at 7:44 pm
Well, I’m glad I never read any of the privacy notices my phone company sent me. It’s not like they respect their customers’ privacy, anyway.
January 31st, 2006 at 8:12 pm
The comments on whether the government is actually looking in on “you” brings to mind an old episode of “Homicide: Life on the Streets” where the character Munch was at the FBI headquarters and he requested all the files that they had on him. He was expecting a few carts full of stuff as he was “quite the radical” back in the 60s. They come to him with a single sheet of paper.
I do like the idea of “spamming” the intelligence agencies :-)
January 31st, 2006 at 9:27 pm
I find all this data collection very troubling, as any intelligent person would. What really scares me is that I sincerely doubt that they have the capacity to utilize it PROPERLY. The efficient handling of information is not one of their talents. Speaking of which…what ARE
they good at?
February 1st, 2006 at 5:17 am
Whom does a guy living in the EU get to sue to stop Echelon listening in on everything he writes on the net - such as this comment - and everything he say on the phone to his cousins in the States? This is something new for people living in the US but we Europeans have had the NSA nosing through our garbage for years.
And, in so far as spamming the NSA - they’ve spammed themselves. They are the world’s greatest collectors of terra spam, sucking it into their computers with reckless abandon. Clearly they’re already dealing with way over the amount of info they can actually process properly. And chimpy is just telling them to shove more garbage in.