The audacity of the telecom law suits

Quin Hillyer:

Telecommunications companies in the crossfire between congressional Democrats and the White House face lawsuits so breathtaking that it’s a wonder they continue to help anti-terrorism efforts at all when other industries already have balked.

But it’s not just the telecoms at risk: If the plaintiffs receive everything they request, the telecoms could not even survive, and the nation’s entire, everyday communications network could fracture.

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Now consider Hepting v. AT&T, one of the dozens of class-action suits already filed against the telecoms. It reads like the account of a vast fishing expedition in which the plaintiffs claim that any small minnow they catch is a veritable Moby Dick of a privacy invasion.

It claims the surveillance program “intercepts and analyzes the communications of millions of Americans” in an “illegal domestic spying program.” Never mind, of course, that the only way “millions” of Americans could be said to be affected is if they are said to have been subject to unlawful “search and seizure” just by having their phone numbers show up as tiny data bits among “4,000 terabytes (million megabytes)” on the same network that is monitored for the targeted foreign calls. This is hardly a real privacy violation.

Moreover, the suit defines the class of aggrieved citizens as “all individuals” who were customers of the phone company “at any time after September 2001” that the program was in effect. In this one suit, that class is identified as consisting of 24.6 million people. How all 24.6 million Americans could possibly be harmed by this program aimed at suspected foreign terrorists is a question perhaps best answered in the Twilight Zone.

The suit gets wilder still. Not only does it ask for at least $1,000 for each class member for each of two alleged types of violation, but on each of two other counts it asks the companies for at least $100 per alleged victim per day of violation — plus punitive damages and attorney’s expenses.

Do the math: The total potential payout by AT&T for the first two categories of alleged violations is $49.2 billion. Meanwhile, at $100 per day for each day of the four years at issue after 9/11, the total potential liability for each of the two latter counts is $3 trillion, 591 billion.

That number times 2, plus the $49.2 billion, comes out to a potential grand liability of $7.243 trillion. That is half of the entire national economy! And that’s even before “punitive damages” are taken into account.

Of course, no court would ever approve payments so high. One wonders whether the plaintiffs’ lawyers themselves even did the math. But the sheer audacity of a suit anywhere near this size makes a sane observer shudder.

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This is what Democrats call privacy rights? These law suits are a disgrace to the patriotism challenged plaintiff's bar. They are also a disgrace to the Democrats who are trying to keep them alive. If either the Democrats or the plaintiff's lawyers were capable of shame they should be red faced with it. They are putting their greed above the national security of the US. Just in case they think they are doing this for me, I hereby opt out of their case.