Monthly Archives: April 2006

Wiretaps For All

Posted on April 8, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

Two stories in yesterday’s news, each quite ugly on their own, make an even uglier combo.

First, there’s the amazing testimony by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in which he basically asserted that the Fourth Amendment has no operational content. If the President wants a warrantless domestic wiretap, our nation’s chief law-enforcement officer thinks that would be just peachy.

Second, there’s the news that AT&T has apparently been sending all our Internet traffic straight to the NSA.

Wired News: Whistle-Blower Outs NSA Spy Room: AT&T provided National Security Agency eavesdroppers with full access to its customers’ phone calls, and shunted its customers’ internet traffic to data-mining equipment installed in a secret room in its San Francisco switching center, according to a former AT&T worker cooperating in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s lawsuit against the company.

Mark Klein, a retired AT&T communications technician, submitted an affidavit in support of the EFF’s lawsuit this week. That class action lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco last January, alleges that AT&T violated federal and state laws by surreptitiously allowing the government to monitor phone and internet communications of AT&T customers without warrants.

On Wednesday, the EFF asked the court to issue an injunction prohibiting AT&T from continuing the alleged wiretapping, and filed a number of documents under seal, including three AT&T documents that purportedly explain how the wiretapping system works.

(This is the same lawsuit I blogged about earlier. I should also note that although I’m on EFF’s Advisory Board, I had no role in this case.)

Put 1 & 2 together….

Posted in Civil Liberties | 1 Comment

Cyberlaw Exam Inspiration

Posted on April 7, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

People teaching (or studying) cyberlaw may find final exam creation (or study) inspiration in this non-hypothetical case of “NTP vandalism.”

Posted in Law: Internet Law | 1 Comment

JoNel Newman on “Voting Rights in Florida, 1982-2006”

Posted on April 7, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

JoNel Newman, Assistant Professor of Clinical Legal Education here at UM (and also special counsel to the ACLU), has written a major report on the implementation of the Voting Rights Act in Florida. The report, Voting Rights in Florida, 1982-2006, which is being issued today, was commissioned by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund through RenewtheVRA.org, a coalition of national and grassroots civil rights organizations working to renew and strengthen the Voting Rights Act.

Prof. Newman’s report is one of 14 state reports requested by Congress to examine the impact of the Voting Rights Act over the past 25 years, since the last time the Act was fully reauthorized. (The other reports cover Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas and Virginia.) It includes recent examples of voting rights violations, and ties these to a need to renew the expiring provisions of the Voting Rights Act. The report also calls for the extension of assistance to language minorities, including assistance for citizens speaking Haitian Creole, which it says are needed “now more than ever.”

In a press release accompanying the release of the report, Howard Simon, Executive Director of the ACLU of Florida calls it “the most comprehensive analysis produced in the last 25 years documenting the impact of the Voting Rights Act on Florida elections.” Prof. Newman says, “We have made a lot of progress in 40 years but we are far from finished. … All Floridians need to do is look at the elections of 2000 and 2004 to see that VRA violations are still a persistent feature of our State’s political landscape.”

The 1965 Voting Rights Act bans discrimination voting practices such as literacy tests and unfair redistricting schemes. Congress is currently considering whether to renew key parts of the statute, notably those providing for language assistance, Election Day monitors and Justice Department pre-approval of voting changes. Without renewal, these provisions will expire in August, 2007.

Below I reproduce the executive summary of the report:

Continue reading →

Posted in Law: Elections, U.Miami | Comments Off on JoNel Newman on “Voting Rights in Florida, 1982-2006”

Deposition Texas-Style

Posted on April 7, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

Someone posted to YouTube a short video of a particularly horrific deposition excerpt, captioned “Joe Jamail and takes a deposition defended by Edward Carstarphen. Hilarity ensues.” Well, not exactly.

Joe Jamail is a famous Texas lawyer, who has won some big cases and collected some giant fees. Most notably, Jamail represented Pennzoil against Texaco and won a jury verdict for $10.53 billion, then the largest jury verdict ever. Texaco later settled for $3 billion, and Jamail pocketed a third of that.

I suppose it is possible that Mr. Jamail had been smarting from the loss of his title as world’s rudest lawyer. As reported in the National Law Journal in April, 2000,

Until recently, the classic example of incivility in litigation was famed Texas lawyer Joe Jamail’s defense of a deposition witness in the 1993 Paramount-QVC Network-Viacom takeover battle. According to the excerpts of the deposition transcript included in an addendum to an opinion by the Delaware Supreme Court, Jamail told the examining lawyer that he could ‘gag a maggot off a meat wagon’ and made other vituperative remarks that the Delaware court labeled ‘extraordinarily rude, uncivil and vulgar.’ . … Mr. Jamail’s ‘maggot’ rhetoric has now been displaced by a new classic in incivility: a pre-suit letter sent by a New York litigator that threatened the prospective defendant with the ‘legal equivalent of a proctology exam’ if the plaintiff’s claim weren’t satisfied without litigation.

Maybe he wanted his title back.

Posted in Law: Practice | 6 Comments

Our Brownshirts Wear White T-Shirts

Posted on April 6, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

Just keep saying, It Can’t Happen Here.

The Tom DeLay campaign operation is going out in style. Last night it sent out this message to supporters:

We would meet tomorrow morning at 9:45 am on the first floor of the parking garage attached to the Marriott. Please get folks to call our campaign office 281.343.1333 and let us know they can do it – or e-mail Leonard Cash (in the cc field above) so that we can get some head count. Let’s give Lampson a parting shot that wrecks his press conference.

Not surprisingly, this call to action incited violence.

Eyewitness report and photos. More details here.

Posted in Politics: The Party of Sleaze | 3 Comments

Thoughts on the Libby Bombshell

Posted on April 6, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

This is a time when no amount of cynicism is too much. This is a time for Informed Comment.

The admnistration’s current line of defense is when the President does it, it’s not illegal.

Atrios has the perfect rejoinder:

It’s probably reasonable that the president can declassify whatever he wants, or at least I haven’t really seen an especially strong argument to the contrary, but that doesn’t mean that the president can declassify stuff, show it to Judy Miller, and then turn around claim the stuff is still classified. That’s where this argument falls apart.

The Carpetbagger Report: All of a sudden it’s a scandal again shows how completely the administration’s latest spin conflicts with the previous spin.

I wonder how long before the defense becomes, ‘Cheney said Bush authorized the leak, but in fact he was mistaken on that point.’ Nixon threw Agnew to the wolves. But it didn’t work.

(Here’s the full text of the Special Prosecutor’s filing)

Bonus: David Neiwert challenges the media.

Posted in Politics: The Party of Sleaze, Politics: US: GW Bush Scandals | 1 Comment