THIS MODERN WORLD

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.

Don’t know why. Working on it.

All better now.

… but speaking of comments …

My nice quiet little corner of the internet has suddenly become a raucous party. Not sure how I feel about that, though you all seem like a pretty nice crowd. Only one real troll so far, and he/she was polite enough — but far too insistent. Here’s the deal: if this is a raucous party, it’s for me and my friends. If you’re going to barge in and demand to be the center of attention and generally behave like the loud drunk that no one invited, you’ll be eighty-sixed.

Also, a comments week rule arising from the Colbert thread: anyone who suggests that the host’s choice of a given topic is too frivilous when there are Serious Issues in the World To Be Solved will have their comment run through a pirate translator and reposted.

Sample comment: How can you waste time writing about your new book when there are children starving in the world?

Sample comment run through pirate translator: Yarrr! How can ye waste time writin’ about your new book when thar be sprogs starvin’ in t’ world?

Like that.

Since my more optimistic friends in the blogosphere are taking the opportunity to thank the 25 Dems who supported the filibuster (at least, since late last week after getting harassed by their base), here’s the list of the Democrats who didn’t support the filibuster.

Akaka (D-HI)
Baucus (D-MT)
Bingaman (D-NM)
Byrd (D-WV)
Cantwell (D-WA)
Carper (D-DE)
Conrad (D-ND)
Dorgan (D-ND)
Inouye (D-HI)
Johnson (D-SD)
Kohl (D-WI)
Landrieu (D-LA)
Lieberman (D-CT)
Lincoln (D-AR)
Nelson (D-FL)
Nelson (D-NE)
Pryor (D-AR)
Rockefeller (D-WV)
Salazar (D-CO)

What’s the point of having a Democratic Senate when almost half of the caucus (like the 19 listed above) is too afraid of their constituents to do the right thing? Is there any issue these men and women are willing to ignore the polls and fight for? Based on what we’ve seen, we know they aren’t willing to fight to protect freedom of privacy, due process, or checks and balances. These men and women (most of whom voted against Alito, btw) care more about their job security than protecting your personal freedoms. This is the worst form of pandering and the Democratic leadership should keep this list handy if the Democrats accidentally regain the Senate any time soon. Don’t support the party? No committee chairmanship for you.

Speaking of pandering, as much as I love Digby, I’m gonna have to disagree with him on this one :

I keep hearing that it’s bad that these Senators “pandered” to the blogosphere and I don’t understand it. We want them to pander to the blogosphere. In their book Politicians Don’t Pander; Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness Lawrence R. Jacobs and Robert Y. Shapiro argue:

Politicians respond to public opinion, then, but in two quite different ways. In one, politicians assemble information on public opinion to design government policy. This is usually equated with “pandering,” and this is most evident during the relatively short period when presidential elections are imminent. The use of public opinion research here, however, raises a troubling question: why has the derogatory term “pander” been pinned on politicians who respond to public opinion? The answer is revealing: the term is deliberately deployed by politicians, pundits, and other elites to belittle government responsiveness to public opinion and reflects a long-standing fear, uneasiness, and hostility among elites toward popular consent and influence over the affairs of government

Bingo. It isn’t actually pandering. It’s responsiveness.

The difference between pandering and responsiveness is that legitimate responsiveness isn’t patronizing. If Kerry was legitimately moved by the extremity of Alito’s views, he wouldn’t have announced his plan to filibuster at the last minute while he was in Europe. He would have stayed home and tried to gain the support of his fellow Democrats. At the very least, he would have given Harry Reid a phone call. If the red state Dems who voted against cloture really didn’t think Alito was extreme enough to filibuster, they wouldn’t have voted “No” on his confirmation. These weren’t decisions based on conviction, they were attempts to kiss the asses of various segments of the electorate. It’s the sincerity, stupid.

Now I know this next part is going to sound hopelessly naive, but I don’t want a party that’s only able to act in reaction to events on the ground. I want a proactive Democratic party that doesn’t need to be harassed in order to see that Justice Alito is a wingnut. While other bloggers find it refreshing that netroots activists were able to convince 25 Senators to support a filibuster, I’m saddened that trying to block Alito’s confirmation didn’t come as second nature. I thought we had similar values, but if it still takes a massive effort on our part to get this far, then we’re probably just better off pretending to be evangelicals and calling the Republicans. If we’re going to have to get on our knees and beg our Representatives to do the right thing, we might as well beg the people who have the power.

For years now, the Democrats have been promising us that their flip-flopping and brown-nosing was no big deal because they wouldn’t buckle when it came to the big fights. Yet we’ve been tricked into excusing this sort of behavior time and again. You guys supported the Patriot Act, the Iraq War resolution, the Medicare Drug Bill, the President’s tax cuts, the promotion of torture advocate Alberto Gonzales, and now the appointment of two conservative ideologues to the Supreme Court. Sure, a plurality of Dems are usually in the opposition, but when you’ve got Obama supporting “tort reform”, Feinstein supporting the prescription drug debacle, Kerry and Clinton supporting the Iraq war resolution, Feingold voting to confirm John Roberts and almost everybody supporting the Patriot Act, this isn’t something that can just be laid at the feet of the usual suspects like Joe Lieberman. Over and over again we see Democrats support the President’s agenda and we’re supposed to believe everything will magically get better once you guys get into power? If the Democratic-controlled the Senate from mid-2001 to the end of 2002 is any indication, the Dem weakness on the Alito confirmation, the President’s unconstitutional spying program, and the Republican bribery scandal is just business as usual.

Stephen Colbert doesn’t have the balls to invite me on his little “program”.

It’s true. Some producers at the so-called “Colbert Report” were initially enthused about having me as a guest (in conjunction with the release of my new book) — but somehow, somewhere up the chain of command, the idea was slapped down.

There’s only one explanation that I can see. And it involves Mr. Colbert’s balls.

You’re on notice, Stephen Colbert.

Joe Lieberman’s hometown newspaper, the New Haven Register, has a daily “Soundoff” column, in which readers are invited to phone in their opinions on a question of the day for the next day’s edition. The questions range from banal everyday subjects to political topics; the respondents usually skew at least two-thirds conservative. In other words, these are exactly the voters Joe hopes to win over with his own special brand of democonservatism. Anyway, the responses to this morning’s question, “how do you rate Sen. Lieberman’s job performance?” are not particularly encouraging for our boy Joe. (The section’s not online, so I’m posting a scan. Click on the excerpt below to see all the responses.)

Update 1: Welcome, Kossackians! Take off your shoes, stay awhile.

Update 2: Potential Lieberman challenger Ned Lamont needs 1,000 Connecticut residents to sign up as volunteers, here.