Warrantless Wiretaping Court Decisions

I'm not quite sure what to make of this.

"The Ninth Circuit yesterday issued two decisions in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuits against the National Security Agency (Jewel v. NSA) and the telecommunications companies (Hepting v. AT&T). EFF had argued in Hepting that the retroactive immunity passed by Congress was unconstitutional. The Ninth Circuit decision (PDF) upholds the immunity and the district court's dismissal of the case. Short of an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, this effectively ends the suit against the telecoms. In much better news, the same panel issued a decision (PDF) reversing the dismissal of the lawsuit against the N.S.A. and remanded the case back to the lower court for more proceedings. These cases have been previously discussed here."

So simultaneously the 9th ruled that Bush's/Congress's retroactive immunity for telco's was legal, and that the case accusing the govt of funneling all communications through NSA monitoring should be sent back to a lower court.

Why do I think a filing with the SCOTUS is not far away?

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/dragnet-surveillance-case/

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/12/30/1549228/warrantless-wiretapping-decisions-issued-by-ninth-circuit-court

11 tech pioneers who died in 2011

And were not named Steve. I knew of a few of these but no where near all.

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/12/11-who-died-in-2011-and-werent-steve-jobs/?pid=32&viewall=true

How meta!

I'm dealing with a special project at work that runs a bit of a risk of the configuration blowing up my Windows installation, so I'm not using my physical box (via remote connection/VPN), I'm using a VMWare clone of it. And now I'm using VirtualBox to run a virtual machine that I copied from someone else that I'm hoping has good config information. And my Mac is running Parallels VM to connect to the first VM.

So we have: Mac OS-X -> Parallels XP Pro -> VMWare XP Pro -> VirtualBox XP Pro.