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Court Says President Bush Violated Wiretapping Laws With Warrantless Wiretap
from the wow dept
In a huge ruling, a court has said that the US government violated wiretapping laws in eavesdropping on phone calls without a warrant.If you haven't been following the fight over the legality of warrantless wiretapping, this case, involving lawyers working with the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, is extremely important. When it was revealed that the Bush administration was wiretapping phonecalls without a warrant, lawsuits were filed -- but the "problem" was that the parties (such as the ACLU) that filed the lawsuits didn't have "standing" because they had no evidence that they, personally, were impacted by the warrantless wiretapping. This created a ridiculous Catch-22 situation. As long as the government hid its illegal activities and never said who it spied on, it could spy on anyone illegally. No one could bring a lawsuit, since there was no proof that they had been impacted by the illegal spying.
Then the feds screwed up. They accidentally sent the evidence of wiretapping some lawyers for the Al-Haramain group to those lawyers. Suddenly there was evidence. But, of course, the government tried to cover it up. For a while it claimed that even though it had revealed that it had illegally spied on these lawyers, and everyone knew it, since those documents were classified, everyone had to pretend that it was still a secret and no one knew about it. This resulted in a series of positively ridiculous hoops that lawyers had to jump through to bring the case, without actually using the document.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100331/1228088813.shtml
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