Judge denies AT&T request for closed hearing

[coderman]

wow, perhaps the attempted DoJ dismissal is going to get rejected as well...

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-6073480.html

"""
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."

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 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."

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.
"""