Warrantless Wiretaping Court Decisions

[thewayne]

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

Comments

[silveradept]

It'll go there anyway, regardless of how things work out - the government won't accept an answer that says they did something wrong, and the EFF won't stop pressing them about the thing they did that was wrong.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

That's about the size of it. The gov't wants absolute power, most rational people don't want them to have it, and the EFF is fighting the battle.