Judges tosses terrorist surveillance cases

NY Times:

A federal judge on Wednesday threw out more than three dozen lawsuits claiming that the nation’s major telecommunications companies had illegally assisted in the wiretapping without warrants program approved by President George W. Bush after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Federal District Court in Northern California said that although consumer and privacy groups raised important constitutional issues in their claims, Congress had left no doubt about its “unequivocal intention” when it passed a measure last summer giving immunity to phone carriers in the wiretapping program.The ruling represents a major victory not only for AT&T and other carriers, which faced potential damages of billions of dollars if they lost the cases, but also for intelligence officials in Washington who had fought assertively in their defense. Officials from both the Bush and the Obama administrations maintained that the cooperation of the phone companies has been vital to national security and that penalizing them for their participation would jeopardize important surveillance operations.

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The groups argued that the lawsuits were one of the few means available for the public to gain important information about the underpinnings of the wiretapping program, which allowed the National Security Agency to eavesdrop without court warrants on the international communications of Americans suspected of links to Al Qaeda.

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At best these groups are useful idiots of al Qaeda. At worst they act like they are trying to assist the enemy in thwarting surveillance measures used to discover their communications with operatives. The cases never made any sense from a so called concern about privacy of terrorist communications. People making war against this country have no privacy rights, and anyone communicating with the enemy also gives up any right to privacy.

These cases are an outgrowth of the NY Times disclosure of these intelligence surveillance efforts. It was a terrible mistake for which the paper has suffered few consequences other than loss of respect of those who are trying to protect us from a wicked enemy.