Fergie's Tech Blog

EFF-NSA-AT&T: New Round of Legal Filings

Ryan Singel writes over on the 27B Stroke 6 blog:

There's been a new round of legal filings in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's suit against AT&T alleging that the telecom helped the government conduct a widespread and illegal eavesdropping campaign on American citizens. We read the PDFs so you don't have to.

AT&T already told the court it wants back the documents that retired AT&T technician Mark Klein. In a new filing, the EFF says that's ridiculous, since the EFF didn't steal them, Klein did and gave them to us and we shouldn't have to give them back.

EFF Attorney Kevin Bankston filed a declaration saying that on January 20, Klein unexpectedly walked in their San Francisco offices with some document excerpts in manila envelope and then after the EFF filed suit in late January, Klein handed them the 140 pages of documents in full.

The EFF wants AT&T to start handing over other documents starting now, but AT&T wrote back to say that's simply ridiculous. EFF is ignoring that the government is stepping in to assert the state secrets privilege and so the process of discovery shouldn't start until Judge Vaughn Walker rules on.

More here. They also have the links to the .pdf's referenced.

posted by Fergie @ 5/03/2006 06:44:00 AM