[ale] OT: Forget Comcast, I wanna move to Germany!

[Jeff Lightner]

It was an illegal request and therefore an illegal collusion IMO.

Letting the government say "this was between us and a corporation" is
specious at best.  It is "searching" the records that YOU own because it
is about YOU not about the corporation and this is in fact prohibited.
The government can't search your home saying "We know some people are
criminals and by searching all homes we can find who they are".   The
government could bypass all laws by simply using corporations as proxies
to do so.   What if they decided to make "agreements" with Home
Owner's/Condo associations or Apartment Management companies to bypass
laws?

Wild accusations without facts?  You're implying AT&T did NOT turn over
records?  If they didn't then why didn't they deny it like everyone else
and why did they feel the need to change their policy?

You seem to take a lot of umbrage at the suggestion.  Do you have stock
in AT&T?

I note you also ignored what I said about the discussion not starting
out as one about "law".   You seem to focus on this because you can't
challenge the underlying assumption that people you PAY for a service do
not become the arbiters of information about that service.




-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Jim
To: ale at ale.org
Popovitch
Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2007 3:24 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] OT: Forget Comcast, I wanna move to Germany!

On Thu, 2007-04-05 at 14:46 -0400, Jeff Lightner wrote:
> The law that prevents it is called the Constitution.  The government
is
> not allowed to "search and seize" without due process. 

The government isn't searching and seizing, wrt AT&T and other telcos.
The govt asked and the telcos agreed.  It's a business-govt agreement,
and they happen all the time in all sorts of areas.  If you don't like
businesses working with various governmental agencies, get a new law
passed.  Apparently nothing illegal has occurred, other than folks
making wild accusations without facts. ;-)

> The fact that someone chooses to collude with illegal NSA requests
> doesn't make such a request legal.

Nor does it make it illegal, which is something you seem to
(incorrectly) be thinking.  The NSA has the permission to request
anything they want from others.  The only big restriction on the NSA is
against themselves doing internal spying.  Look at Echelon to learn more
about what the current (and past) laws allow for.   Agreements between
two parties, to share data, are perfectly legal inside the limits of the
law, and the Constitution.  Again, you may not like this, but that is a
different problem.

-Jim P.

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