[ news_security_news ]
EFF Fights AT&T Over State Secrets
David Utter
Staff Writer
2006-06-24
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
The latest battle in the class action suit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation over allegations of wholesale electronic surveillance of Internet traffic by AT&T focused on the federal government's assertion that the case should be dismissed under state secrets privilege.
If the judge in the lawsuit against AT&T sides with the government's petition for state secrets protection of the telecom's operation, the case will come to an end. The EFF is fighting that possibility, as evidenced in its latest statement on the case.
Friday saw the two sides again meet in U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker's court. EFF counsel told Walker that the government should not be able to play the state secrets card against the entire case. They asked that state secrets be considered "in regards to specific evidence and situations instead of derailing the suit all together."
"We have shown that AT&T is diverting traffic wholesale to the NSA," EFF Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl said in a statement. "It is not a secret, and it is no reason to deny AT&T customers the opportunity to show the court that this dragnet surveillance program violates the law and their privacy rights."
AT&T has been accused of providing the National Security Agency with unfettered access to all traffic traveling through a San Francisco facility. The government has contended its operations do not impact people's rights and that their focus is on finding and stopping terrorists bent on attacking citizens in the US.
State secrets privilege dates back to a 1953 case, United States v. Reynolds, according to a report on the Federation of American Scientists website. Three widows of Air Force crew members who died in a 1948 B-29 crash had requested accident reports about the incident, and were denied by the Air Force.
The Supreme Court upheld the Air Force position that information in the reports contained secret information vital to state security. Reynolds provided the federal government with a state secrets privilege that there are "military matters which, in the interest of national security, should not be divulged," not even to a federal court.
AT&T Inc. and AT&T Corp. both filed for dismissal of the EFF case. Also, several media groups requested that Walker unseal evidence currently closed to public view in the lawsuit.
---
Tag: AT&T
Add to  Del.icio.us |  Digg |  Yahoo! My Web |  Furl
Get all the updates in RSS: 
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
More news_security_news Articles
Insider Reports RSS Feed
|
|
iEntry 10th Anniversary
RSS
Archive
