{"id":187801,"date":"2011-03-01T20:51:00","date_gmt":"2011-03-02T01:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2011\/03\/01\/att-has-no-right-to-privacy\/"},"modified":"2011-03-01T20:51:00","modified_gmt":"2011-03-02T01:51:00","slug":"att-has-no-right-to-privacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2011\/03\/01\/att-has-no-right-to-privacy\/","title":{"rendered":"AT&#038;T Has No Right to Privacy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court decided that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/news\/nationworld\/nation\/sc-dc-0302-supreme-court-corporations20110301,0,5449631.story\">corporations do not have a right to personal privacy under the Freedom of Information Act statute<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>It was not even close.&nbsp; It was unanimous, and there wasn&#8217;t even a separate concurring opinion. <\/p>\n<p>The facts are clear:&nbsp; AT&amp;T cheated the government when it was wiring up schools and libraries, got caught, and paid a fine.<\/p>\n<p>What happened next was that its competitors made FOIA requests to find out exactly what they did, and AT&amp;T claimed that this would constitute an unwarranted intrusion of the corporation&#8217;s personal privacy which might &#8220;embarrass&#8221; it, which some some federal appellate judge who did too much LDS in the 60s actually bought that crap.<\/p>\n<p>In reviewing the opinion, written by John Roberts (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.law.cornell.edu\/supct\/html\/09-1279.ZO.html\">see here<\/a>)what is exceedinbly clear is that John Roberts thought that this was an opportunity to sound &#8220;arch&#8221; or &#8220;witty&#8221;:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>    <span style=\"color: blue;\">We disagree.  Adjectives typically reflect the meaning of  corresponding nouns, but not always.  Sometimes they acquire distinct  meanings of their own.  The noun \u201ccrab\u201d refers variously to a crustacean  and a type of apple, while the related adjective \u201ccrabbed\u201d can refer to  handwriting that is \u201cdifficult to read,\u201d Webster\u2019s Third New  International Dictionary 527 (2002); \u201ccorny\u201d can mean \u201cusing familiar  and stereotyped formulas believed to appeal to the unsophisticated,\u201d      <\/span><i style=\"color: blue;\">      id.,     <\/i><span style=\"color: blue;\">      at 509, which has little to do with \u201ccorn,\u201d      <\/span><i style=\"color: blue;\">      id.,     <\/i><span style=\"color: blue;\">      at 507 (\u201cthe seeds of any of the cereal grasses used for food\u201d);  and while \u201ccrank\u201d is \u201ca part of an axis bent at right angles,\u201d \u201ccranky\u201d  can mean \u201cgiven to fretful fussiness,\u201d      <\/span><i style=\"color: blue;\">      id.,     <\/i><span style=\"color: blue;\">      at 530.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Maybe it&#8217;s just me, but he sounds neither &#8220;arch&#8221; nor &#8220;witty&#8221;, but rather like an 8<sup>th<\/sup> grade student who thinks that he is far more clever than he actually is.<\/p>\n<p>It was a good decision, but Roberts&#8217; opinion is just plain lame.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court decided that corporations do not have a right to personal privacy under the Freedom of Information Act statute. It was not even close.&nbsp; It was unanimous, and there wasn&#8217;t even a separate concurring opinion. The facts are clear:&nbsp; AT&amp;T cheated the government when it was wiring up schools &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1005,971,972,985,979],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-civil-rights","category-justice","category-regulation","category-wanker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187801"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187801"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187801\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}