[CitizensTruth] AT&T Whistleblower: FISA bill creates "police state infrastructure"

[Jay Becker]

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/06/att-whistleblow.html
 
AT&T Whistleblower: Spy Bill Creates 'Infrastructure for a Police State'
 
By Ryan Singel June 27, 2008 | 1:14:59 PM
 
 
Mark Klein, the retired AT&T
engineer who stepped forward with the technical documents at the heart
of the anti-wiretapping case against AT&T, is furious at the
Senate's vote on Wednesday night to hold a vote on a bill intended to put an end to that lawsuit and more than 30 others.
 

[Wednesday]'s vote by Congress effectively gives retroactive
immunity to the telecom companies and  endorses an all-powerful
president. It’s a Congressional coup against the Constitution. The
Democratic leadership is touting the deal as a "compromise," but in
fact they have endorsed the infamous Nuremberg defense: "Just following
orders." The judge can only check their paperwork. This cynical deal is
a Democratic exercise in deceit and cowardice.

Klein saw a network monitoring room being built in AT&T's
internet switching center that only NSA-approved techs had access to.
He squirreled away documents and then presented them to the press and
the Electronic Frontier Foundation after news of the government's
warrantless wiretapping program broke.

Wired.com independently acquired a copy of the documents (.pdf) -- which were under court seal -- and published the wiring documents in May 2006 so that they could be evaluated.
The lawsuit that resulted from his documents is now waiting on the
9th U.S. Appeals Court to rule on whether it can proceed despite the
government saying the whole matter is a state secret. A lower court
judge ruled that it could, because the government admitted the program
existed and that the courts could handle evidence safely and in secret.

But the appeals court ruling will likely never see the light of day, since the Senate is set to vote on July 8 on the FISA Amendments Act of 2008,
which also largely legalizes Bush's warrantless wiretapping program by
expanding how the government can wiretap from inside the United States
without getting individualized court orders.

Klein continues:

Congress has made the FISA law a dead letter--such a law is useless
if the president can break it with impunity. Thus the Democrats have
surreptitiously repudiated the main reform of the post-Watergate era
and adopted Nixon’s line: "When the president does it that means that
it is not illegal." This is the judicial logic of a dictatorship.
The surveillance system now approved by Congress provides the
physical apparatus for the government to collect and store a huge
database on virtually the entire population, available for data mining
whenever the government wants to target its political opponents at any
given moment—all in the hands of an unrestrained executive power. It is
the infrastructure for a police state.
Neither the House nor the Senate has had Klein testify, nor have
telecom executives testified in open session about their participation.

The bill forces the district court judge handling the consolidated
cases against telecoms to dismiss the suits if the Attorney General
certifies that a government official sent a written request to a phone
or internet provider, saying that the President approved the program
and his lawyers deemed it legal. Judge Vaughn Walker of the California

    Declare It Now! Wear Orange!
Impeach Bush & Cheney for War Crimes
& Crimes against Humanity!



      
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