No telecom companies have ever challenged the FISC's phone records orders

No telecommunications company has ever challenged the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court's orders for bulk phone records under the Patriot Act, the court revealed on Tuesday.
The secretive Fisa court's disclosure came inside a declassification of its legal reasoning justifying the National Security Agency's ongoing bulk collection of Americans' phone records.
Citing the "unprecedented disclosures" and the "ongoing public interest in this program", Judge Claire V Eagan on 29 August not only approved the Obama administration's request for the bulk collection of data from an unidentified telecommunications firm, but ordered it declassified. Eagan wrote that despite the "lower threshold" for government bulk surveillance under Section 215 of the Patriot Act compared to other laws, the telephone companies who have received Fisa court orders for mass customer data have not challenged the law.
"To date, no holder of records who has received an Order to produce bulk telephony metadata has challenged the legality of such an Order," Eagan wrote. "Indeed, no recipient of any Section 215 Order has challenged the legality of such an order, despite the mechanism for doing so."
That complicity has not been total. Before the Bush administration moved the bulk phone records collection under the authority of the Fisa court, around 2006, Qwest Communications refused to participate in the effort.
http://www.theguardian.com/law/2013/sep/17/fisa-court-bulk-phone-records-collection
FISC opinion upholds NSA phone spying program:
The 29-page opinion signed by Claire V. Eagan, a judge on the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), is the first to be released that addresses the constitutionality of the NSA’s “bulk records” collection of phone data.
The FISA court's opinion is in substantial agreement with the government's interpretation of its powers under the Patriot Act.
Citing a supreme court precedent, Eagan found that there are no Fourth Amendment protections around so-called "metadata", the records of phone numbers dialed and received or the times and durations of phone calls. While the precedent, Smith v Maryland, had to do with an individual case, Eagan wrote that the collection of metadata from millions of people does not, en masse, create a constitutional problem.
The ruling also reaffirmed the government’s contention, upheld by the Supreme Court in 1979, that Americans have no reasonable expectation of privacy in records of their calls held by phone companies, and a warrant to collect them is not required. A warrant would be required to wiretap the calls.
The gathering of “all call detail records” from phone companies is justified as long as the government can show that it is relevant to an authorized investigation into known — and, significantly — unknown terrorists who may be in the United States, the Aug. 29 opinion states.
Moreover, the government need only show that there are “reasonable grounds to believe” the records will be relevant to the investigation, a lower burden than required in ordinary criminal investigations.
That is justified because the goal is to prevent a terrorist attack, not solve a crime that has already taken place, the court said, affirming the government’s position.
“This isn’t a judicial opinion in the conventional sense,” said Jameel Jaffer, American Civil Liberties Union deputy legal director. “It’s a document that appears to have been cobbled together over the last few weeks in an effort to justify a decision that was made seven years ago. I don’t know of any precedent for that, and it raises a lot of questions.”
Jaffer added that the opinion was “completely unpersuasive” as a defense of the call-records program. The constitutional analysis fails to mention the landmark United States v. Jones privacy case decided by the Supreme Court last year, which suggested a warrant was necessary for long-term tracking of GPS data, he said. And Eagan’s analysis of the statute overemphasizes some terms while ignoring others, he said.
“On the whole, the opinion only confirms the folly of entrusting privacy rights to a court that hears argument only from the government,” said Jaffer, referring to the fact that there is no adversary in the classified proceedings.
Eagan’s ruling endorsed the government's argument that the broad collection was necessary to find unknown terrorist operatives who may be in the United States “because it is impossible to know where in the data the connections to international terrorist organizations will be found.”
http://www.uscourts.gov/uscourts/courts/fisc/br13-09-primary-order.pdf
The NSA's spying program is unconstitutional:
The rationale that, at least to the Court, buttressed the third party doctrine in Smith v. Maryland, does not support the same finding in the case of the NSA’s section 215 surveillance program. Massive amounts of data gathered, over time, has proven to reveal intimate details about a person’s life that could not previously have been ascertained. Some experts have speculated that the metadata gathered under the NSA’s section 215 surveillance program is actually more sensitive than the content of the telephone calls themselves. In recent cases, like US v. Jones (2012) and Jardines v. US (2013), Supreme Court justices like Justice Sotomayor and Justice Kagan have questioned the continued application of the third party doctrine and expressed a willingness to overrule the third party doctrine in light of today’s technology that allows for persistent, dragnet surveillance.
Since the third party doctrine cannot rescue the NSA’s section 215 surveillance program from the realm of unconstitutionality, the program can no longer continue.
Any legal document that would justify the collection of phone records on all individuals within the United States would undoubtedly fall into the category of an unlawful general warrant and would be, prima facie, unreasonable. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has held previously that NSA-led surveillance programs were inconsistent with the Fourth Amendment, and the section 215 program should end up in the same surveillance graveyard.
By walking back the NSA’s section 215 surveillance program, we can restore a modicum of privacy protection to the communications of all individuals. Notably, the policy can be discarded without seriously impacting legitimate law enforcement or terrorism investigations.
The government has never demonstrated why it must collect all of the metadata for phone calls across the Country in order to investigate terrorist activities. In fact, the justifications the government has invoked stand for the opposite conclusion – that a targeted surveillance program, such as what is anticipated under the language of section 215, would allow the NSA to investigate terror threats.
What abandoning the policy would impact is the surveillance of millions of innocent individuals who are having their everyday communications unknowingly, unlawfully, and unconstitutionally sucked up into a vacuum of government databases.
http://www.mydesert.com/article/20130916/OPINION/309160012/Amie-Stepanovich-NSA-s-spying-program-unconstitutional?gcheck=1
LinkedIn asks for permission to release FISC spying data to its 238 million members:
LinkedIn has petitioned the FISA court to allow it to disclose the number of NSA requests it has received. The news is curious because the Mountain View company’s co-founder and Chairman Reid Hoffman recently told TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington at the Disrupt conference: that LinkedIn had not had “touchpoints” with the NSA or Prism, and that he thought he would know if the company had received such requests. (Hat tip to Politico Morning Tech)
In a letter to LinkedIn members posted on its website, the company said Tuesday, “Despite our outreach and efforts to work cooperatively, we were recently told by the U.S. government that, notwithstanding our commitment to transparency, we were prohibited from providing our members and the general public with even basic, aggregate information regarding the numbers of national security-related requests, if any.” The letter was signed by Erika Rottenberg, LinkedIn’s general counsel.
Other tech companies that have asked the court for permission to disclose similar information are Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft.
http://cryptome.org/2013/09/fisc-linkedin-13-0917.pdf
LinkedIn's FISC Amicus Brief:
We filed an Amicus Brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit urging affirmance of the district court’s ruling in the case of “In Re National Security Letter”, No. 11-02173 SI (N.D. Cal.), which held that national security letter disclosure restrictions (aka “gag orders”) violate the First Amendment and, in particular, that the prohibition on disclosure of the number of such letters received is not required by national security interests. If the Ninth Circuit affirms the district court’s opinion, then we anticipate we will be allowed to include in our Transparency Report the actual number of national security letters we receive, if any, rather than having to do so in buckets of 1000.
http://press.linkedin.com/download-media/423
LinkedIn's transparency report 1st. half of 2013:
http://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/41878
LinkedIn is being sued for hacking user accounts for marketing purposes:
he lawsuit filed by Russ August & Kabat, Los Angeles, reads, "As a part of its effort to acquire new users, Linkedln sends multiple e-mails endorsing its products, services and brand to potential new users," reports Economic Times. "In an effort to optimize the efficiency of this marketing strategy, Linkedln sends these 'endorsement e-mails' to the list of e-mail addresses obtained without its existing users' express consent and, to further enhance the effectiveness of this particular marketing campaign, these endorsement e-mails contain the name and likeness of those existing users from whom Linkedln surreptitiously obtained the list of email addresses."
A LinkedIn user, Deborah Lagutaris, a tax preparer by profession, said to Bloomberg that more than 3000 people on her contact list received invitations from LinkedIn in her user name. When she questioned LinkedIn the company replied, "Oh, you can remove all those invitations from your account manually. We don't know what happened.'' Later, Lagutaris had to add a disclaimer to her page stating that she had not been sending out these spam mails.
http://www.hngn.com/articles/13016/20130923/linkedin-sued-hacking-user-accounts-marketing-purposes.htm#!