A federal appeals court has ruled that telecommunications companies helping the government with its e-mail and eavesdropping program have legal immunity from their actions, and cannot be held liable by customers whose personal information is handed over as part of a government investigation.
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A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed on Thursday a lower court decision regarding the 2008 law, which for the sake of national security, bypasses legal privacy rights. The appeal concerned a case that consolidated 33 different lawsuits filed against various telecom companies — including AT&T , Sprint Nextel , Verizon Communications , and BellSouth Corp. — on behalf of these companies’ customers.
In ruling as constitutional law that companies cannot be held legally liable for helping the government gather intelligence, the court noted comments made by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence regarding the importance of legal immunity for those aiding government investigations.
“[The committee] emphasized that electronic intelligence gathering depends in great part on cooperation from private companies…and that if litigation were allowed to proceed against persons allegedly assisting in such activities, ‘the private sector might be unwilling to cooperate with lawful government requests in the future,’” said Judge M. Margaret McKeown.
Represented by the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union, the plaintiffs accused the companies of violating the law and the privacy of their customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency.
In 2008, Congress passed new surveillance rules that included protection from legal liability for telecommunications companies helping the U.S. spy on Americans without warrants, but the plaintiffs argued that such a law was unconstitutional.
“I think what Congress did was an abdication of its duty to protect people from illegal surveillance,” said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who argued the case before the panel.
Though plaintiffs challenging the government’s surveillance efforts did not get the ruling they had hoped, in a separate opinion on Thursday, a three-judge panel of the court revived two other lawsuits that seek redress for telecom customers whose information may have been compromised by the surveillance program, which they claim is inherently unconstitutional in that it does not require probable cause or a warrant to gather information — both of which are guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.
Two groups of telecom customers are challenging the surveillance program itself, suing the NSA for violating their privacy. The government has tried to kill the cases, hoping to sidestep the legal right to challenge any legislation thought to be unconstitutional, arguing that just to defend the surveillance program in court would jeopardize national security and expose state secrets.
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To contact the reporter on this story: Emily Knapp at staff.writers@wallstcheatsheet.com
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