NSA...Phone Call Surveillance...Lawsuits...

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Okay...you saw this coming! "Telecoms face billion dollar wiretap lawsuits: Verizon sued for $50 billion over wiretap program."

Yes, we are a litigious society...the NSA is not immune, is it?

"The legal experts said consumers could sue the phone service providers under communications privacy legislation that dates back to the 1930s. Relevant laws include the Communications Act, first passed in 1934, and a variety of provisions of the Electronic Communications and Privacy Act, including the Stored Communications Act, passed in 1986."

The USA PATRIOT Act widely increased surveillance capabilities without warrants...it changed at least 35 other laws were changed as a result. It will be interesting to see if this comes into play for this, and other, lawsuits, and how.

And there are other lawsuits out there...and more coming...

Dozens of Lawmakers Back Suit Challenging NSA Program: "As debate renewed over the National Security Agency's surveillance program, dozens of Democrats in the House of Representatives backed a lawsuit filed in New York that challenges the government's program of wiretapping without warrants."
Hide and go seek: "The nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation filed the class action lawsuit in January on behalf of telephone subscribers against AT&T, charging the telecom illegally gave the NSA access to records. Many of the allegations were echoed in the USA Today story last week."

Here's an interesting discussion of the legalities of the NSA surveillance...

* Online groups reveal details, legalities of NSA surveillance

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Rebecca Herold's Bio:

Rebecca Herold,CISSP, CIPP, CISM, CISA, FLMI, has been providing information security, privacy and regulatory assistance and services to organizations from a wide range of industries for over 18 years. Rebecca was instrumental in building the information security and privacy program while at Principal Financial Group, which was awarded the CSI Information Security Program of the Year Award in 1998. IT Security ranked Rebecca as one of the top 59 IT security influencers, and Computerworld put Rebecca their list of the 25 top privacy experts and on their list of the 9 best privacy consulting firms. Rebecca has been CPO for two consulting organizations, and has had her own information privacy, security and compliance business since 2004. Rebecca has written chapters for several books, dozens of articles, and has been writing a monthly privacy column for the CSI Alert newsletter since the beginning of 2001, and is working on her 11th book. Some of her other books include The Privacy Papers, Managing an Information Security and Privacy Awareness and Training Program, The Definitive Guide to Security Inside the Perimeter (Realtime Publishers), The Shortcut Guide to Improving IT Service Support through ITIL (Realtime Publishers), and The Practical Guide to HIPAA Privacy and Security Compliance. In addition, Rebecca is the leader of The Realtime IT Compliance Community where she posts to her IT Compliance weblog. You can contact Rebecca at: rebecca_herold@realtimepublishers.net.

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