Judge Rejects Customer Suit Over Records From AT&T

JUDGE REJECTS CUSTOMER SUIT OVER RECORDS FROM AT&T
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Adam Liptak]
A federal judge in Chicago dismissed a class-action lawsuit yesterday against AT&T that claimed it had illegally given information about its customers to the National Security Agency. The judge, Matthew F. Kennelly, based his ruling on the state secrets privilege, which can bar suits that would disclose information harmful to national security. The ruling is at first blush at odds with a decision last week by a federal judge in San Francisco. That judge, Vaughn R. Walker, allowed a similar suit against AT&T to proceed notwithstanding the state secrets privilege. But the two decisions can be reconciled, Judge Kennelly wrote. The Chicago case concerns records of phone calls, including when they were placed, how long they lasted and the phone numbers involved. The San Francisco case, by contrast, mainly concerns an N.S.A. program aimed not at a vast sweep of customers’ records but at the contents of a more limited number of communications. Because the Bush administration has confirmed the existence of such targeted wiretapping, the San Francisco suit could proceed without running afoul of the state secrets privilege, Judge Walker ruled last week. ‘‘The government has opened the door for judicial inquiry,” he wrote, “by publicly confirming and denying material information about its monitoring of communications content.” In his decision yesterday, Judge Kennelly said there had been no comparable confirmation by the government or AT&T of “the existence or nonexistence of AT&T’s claimed record turnover.” He refused to rely on news accounts of the program as proof of its existence and noted that “no executive branch official has officially confirmed or denied the existence of any program to obtain large quantities of customer telephone records.” The case was brought by the journalist Studs Terkel, five other individual plaintiffs and the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. They argued that the program violated a federal law that forbids the disclosure of some customer records to the government, and they sought a court order to stop it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/26/us/26nsa.html
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* Judge Dismisses Lawsuit On AT& T Data Handover
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/25/AR2006072501363.html