[Infowarrior] - Judge denies AT&T request for closed hearing

Wed May 17 20:14:29 EDT 2006

Judge denies AT&T request for closed hearing

By Declan McCullagh
http://news.com.com/Judge+denies+AT38T+request+for+closed+hearing/2100-7348_
3-6073480.html

Story last modified Wed May 17 17:12:03 PDT 2006

SAN FRANCISCO--A federal judge rejected a request from AT&T on Wednesday to
kick the public out of a hearing in a lawsuit alleging the
telecommunications company illegally cooperated with the National Security
Agency.

AT&T had asked U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker to bar everyone but
attorneys from the courtroom, arguing that trade secrets about the inner
workings of its network could be divulged.

"We have intellectual property rights in that information," said David
Anderson, an attorney at Pillsbury Winthrop who is representing AT&T. "We
submit that the hearing itself be held 'in camera,'" a legal term meaning in
private.

But Walker rejected the request, saying that carefully dealing with
questions about trade secrets in an open courtroom "is not unprecedented."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group in San Francisco,
filed the class action lawsuit in January that claims AT&T illegally
cooperated with the Bush administration's secret eavesdropping program. EFF
has obtained documents from a former AT&T employee that it believes
buttresses its case, but which the telecommunications company says contain
trade secrets and proprietary business information.

Both sides have been quarreling over what to do with the documents provided
by former AT&T technician Mark Klein and filed under seal with the court,
with EFF saying they should be made entirely public and AT&T arguing they
should be returned because they contain confidential information.

Walker on Wednesday effectively split the difference, saying that he would
maintain the current state of affairs for now. He also ordered EFF's
attorneys not to "disclose these documents to any party," and rejected
AT&T's request that Klein be muzzled, saying the company could sue him
directly if it chose.

Based on the information that's been made public so far, the 100 pages or so
of information in Klein's documents appear to describe a secret room
established in AT&T's main switching centers through which a tremendous
amount of Internet and voice traffic flows. Those secret rooms, according to
Klein's attorney, give the NSA full access to the company's networks and can
be found in switching centers in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and San
Jose, Calif.

CNET Networks (publisher of CNET News.com), Wired News and the California
First Amendment Coalition sent an attorney to the hearing on Wednesday to
argue that the public should not be prevented from attending the
proceedings. A letter (click for PDF) written by Roger Myers at Holme,
Roberts & Owen submitted early in the day said the hearing should remain
open because "the surveillance at the heart of the case presents issues of
enormous public interest and importance."

A second set of media organizations including the San Jose Mercury News, the
Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Associated Press
also sent an attorney--Karl Olson of Levy, Ram & Olson--to the hearing,
which lasted nearly two hours.