Google, Facebook tell SCOTUS it should be harder for you to sue them

2 Comments

1. 2021-02-10 6:59 pm

   Alfman verbose=1

   Facebook, Google, and all the others submitted a filing (PDF) to the Supreme Court this week basically arguing that if you cannot prove the specific extent to which their screwup injured you, you should not have any grounds to be part of a lawsuit against them.

   This sounds very similar to the arguments used by the US government in it’s warrantless wiretapping program in the mid-2000s. After 9/11 the Bush administration gave ATT immunity for cooperating with government. It’s blurry now given how long ago it was and how many years it spanned, but I remember the courts ruling in favor of the government and ATT over the technicality that the public doesn’t have standing to sue. This was all a precursor to the snowden leaks.

   https://www.theregister.com/2006/02/01/atandt_wiretap_assistance_suit/
   https://www.pcworld.com/article/239122/nsa_att_warrantless_wiretapping_case_set_for_court.html

   After passage of that law, which amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the organization behind the initial lawsuit, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, initiated another action aimed directly against the government, Jewel v. NSA.

   The Electronic Frontier Foundation will ask the appeals court to reverse a decision dismissing the Jewel case. A lower court argued that since millions of Americans were spied on by the government, no single citizen had standing to sue the government. The court’s reasoning in its ruling may be weak, since the government in its filings with the appeals court spends more verbiage reheating the national security chestnut than trying to defend the lower court’s logic.

   With the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act amendments, the Hepting case took on a new dimension. Now the Electronic Frontier is using the lawsuit to challenge those amendments as unconstitutional. The amendments, the foundation maintains, give the president the power to issue a “get out of lawsuit free” card to companies that cooperate with federal snoops.

   This was kind of infuriating to many of us because the government was violating the constitution. This was just with phone networks. Snowden revealed the true scope of the government spying operations. Despite the incriminating leaks against our rights, I don’t think anyone saw even a single day in prison. Nothing changes.
2. 2021-02-11 12:28 am

   Anonymous

   They are already pretty much invulnerable, but of course, they want even more protections than their sheer size, wealth, influence, and monopoly positions already give them. How surprising.

   Reading this I get the impression that executives at the top of these corporations are not just viewing themselves as lords of the manor but kings and angling for privileges they feel entitled to. A serious case of much wants more.

   I am not a resource…

   This in the same week that in the UK the monarch was revealed to have been secretly given special privileges to interfere with law behind the scenes while Parliament nodded along because there was “no evidence” the relevant parliamentary proceedure was more than a cosmetic technicality. Now we know it isn’t this proceedure could be done away with in an afternoon. Will it? I suspect not because it would be the crack in the dam. The whole issue of “royal prerogative” and “parliamentary sovereignity” and abuse of public office and lack of a written constitution and human rights protection, and voting systems would come under the microscope. Let’s not get started on Brexit but Brexit was to a large degree a symptom of this.

   “But the monarchy doesn’t cost a lot” Royalists claim. As we now know it costs the public more than we realise. Beyond the pure financial cost found in the accounting books there is the cost of the monarchy being a symbol and encouragement for power trippers and establishment comfortable with the status quo. There is the depressing effect on freedom and wellbeing and the general sea anchor holding back progress on social and other reform. The cost of this can be argued to run into the billions per annum. The opportunity cost and social disadvantage incalculable. No getting shot of them is not a magic bullet and comes with other issues but enough is enough.

   I am not a subject…

   It is noticable among the developed nations the UK and US are the most unequal in the world and getting worse.