Spock's Brain

...would explode from the illogic steaming from the Conservateria. Reminds me of one of the comic vignettes from 'Airplane': "Shana...they bought their tickets, they knew what they were doing...I say, let 'em crash!"

Think Progress » Did You Consent to Be Wiretapped?

“Consent” appears to be the right wing’s favorite defense for the apparent decision by major phone companies to hand over millions of customers’ calling records to the National Security Agency. As reported in the Washington Post, “the Bush administration has argued that a company can turn over its entire database of customer records — and even the stored content of calls and e-mails — because customers ‘have consented to that’ when they establish accounts.”

ThinkProgress has been compiling legal answers to all the questions about telco liability, here and here. Here’s why the consent argument won’t work:

[snip]

3. You can’t consent to a secret program. [DUH!] Under this
“consent” defense, a federal court would have to hold that even the
people outraged by the NSA program have given their individual consent
to it. That’s a legal fiction we don’t think courts will accept. It’s
doubtful we can give our consent to any secret program.

Technorati Tags: NSA, spying, illogic, consent, lies, liars