FISA court judge: No company has ever challenged Patriot Act sharing

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/fisa-court-judge-no-company-has-ever-challenged-patriot-act-sharing/

by rosser • 13 years ago

125 27 13 years ago

feifan• 13 years ago

Goes without saying that the system is broken. But I'd imagine it's easier/cheaper to just hand over the data than challenge the request and get lawyers involved…

bediger40003• 13 years ago

Can a receipient of a FISA court order even get their own lawyers involved?

Given the kind of hair splitting, finely honed definitions and word games going on in Congressional testimony, I wouldn't put it past FISA judges/spokesmodels/whatever to claim that nobody ever challenged an order when there's actually no procedure to perform such a challenge, and no attempts to challenge have even been recognized.

DannyBee5• 13 years ago

1. Yes, it's specifically allowed by statute to talk to your lawyer about it

2. The FISC judge is correct in his statement. For that type of order, their is a procedure, it's documented in both the statute and the rules, and has a documented appeals procedure that leads to the supreme court.

He's not a spokesmodel, he's a federal judge. While some small percentage are certainly political appointees, this one, and others, are more deserving of respect than you are giving them.

joe_the_user• 13 years ago

A friend of might received rather extreme abuse while working in a classified position. The only potential means he had to deal with it was finding a competent labor lawyer who also had clearance. Naturally, the easier course of action was to write off the experience. Secrecy and unquestionable authority breed contemptuous disregard for your fellow humans.

Yeah, "Nobody ever challenged this", most likely because of the high barriers to challenge, etc.

Basically, not only is FISA broken but a society that tolerates a "classified" area of work and information is doomed to have that secret area metastasize and suck the life out of it.

yuhong• 13 years ago

I wrote these on PRISM and Google:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6054532

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6078124

josh2600• 13 years ago

I think you're being downvoted for linking to your comments without explaining why they're relevant.

I would assume, though, given their scale, that someone at one of these companies has the necessary clearance to contest. I think FISA is being intentionally facetious, or rather technically. I find it impossible to believe no one has attempted, but find it plausible that the government has yet to give anyone standing to sue.

Finally, given the sovereign clause, I don't see why the government has to accept a lawsuit against them.

coldcode• 13 years ago

Even if they did how would we ever find out about it?

anigbrowl2• 13 years ago

Declassification, the same way we find out about a lot of things, albeit some time later.

bediger40003• 13 years ago

Yes, and we all know that everything is prompty declassified after it passes its freshness date.

Eventual declassification is a pretty poor substitute for speedy justice.

D9u• 13 years ago

Sadly, in today's upper levels of government, the term "conflict of interest" has been shunted aside for varying reasons.

Also, secret court proceedings are not what one would expect from a nation which constantly cites "moral high ground" as justification for violating its mandate.

Imagine if the Watergate scandal had been squelched by citing "state secrets."

rpgmaker• 13 years ago

Am I the only one getting "Resource not found" on the arstechnica site?

nwh• 13 years ago

I'm not seeing any errors with it, but here's a mirror anyway — http://archive.is/Tm6oG

Mordor• 13 years ago

TIL secret courts breed lazy judges

chris_wot• 13 years ago

The only thing flawed about the argument that no corporation has ever challenged a FISA order is that it requires a corporation to challenge a FISA order.

Since when were corporations meant to be the representatives of justice? Since when have they been upholders of citizens rights?

ctdonath• 13 years ago

"Chilling effect" is a very real & recognized legal principle. When The Government™ shows up at your door with near-infinite persuasive & prosecutorial resources, with nods towards teams of heavily armed men and bureaucrats with crates of red tape, telling you in no uncertain terms YOU WILL DO X, and reminding you frequently that this very meeting itself constitutes a National Secret™, with clear and implied statements that while you may have legal alternatives the slightest contact with anything construed as illegal (starting with the reply "no") will bring all this power crashing down on your corporate & private life, one does tend to comply - regardless of likely after-the-fact "well you could have done this" conversations.

So it goes with many Constitutional rights. You can fight for your rights, but "fight" isn't some lofty abstract term, it's "cause serious damage to another while they do the same to you, until one of you is persuaded by harm & further threat thereof to give up."

talmand• 13 years ago

Of course they didn't challenge it, they had no motivation to do so. The whole thing was secret, handing over data was no big deal because no one was to know they did it in the first place. If it wasn't for various whistle-blowers over the years they would probably still be handing over data without comment.

To me, the judge's statement just reinforces the notion that everyone involved had little or no concerns over anyone's rights that were caught up in this huge net.

But now that it's becoming common knowledge that people's data get handed over, I wouldn't be surprised if challenges start happening. Especially when overseas contracts start drying up because no one in their right mind would store their data with a US firm.

FISA court judge: No company has ever challenged Patriot Act sharing

Related Stories