So, I'm thinking of dumping my phone to use VOIP or maybe just only take calls at work. I love that EFF is suing AT&T for this violation of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, various Telecommunications acts, FISA regulations, and AT&T's own contract with customers that says it will not share information with a government agency without a warrant. However, this weekend, the DOJ moved to quash their lawsuit. (News coverage here) I don't know if it's just to protect their secret program or whether they realize this lawsuit probably represents the largest class action in US history. At $1000 dollars a violation, and with literally billions of violations of the law, this could sink these companies without some form of bailout for the phone companies. Qwest is looking awfully smart in the wake of all this, and all they asked for a permission slip from the attorney general and the NSA couldn't even get that from Ashcroft - now there's an illegal program. Let the eagle soar...like she's never soared before.

My lawyer experts seem to think that EFF is screwed though. It sounds like the whole executive privelege thing is going to sink the lawsuit and any kind of accountability for these phone companies is therefore ephemeral. So in Give Up spirit, I suggest we take the following actions to render any potential spying using this stupid ass big-brother program useless (also to be proactive because they're probably doing the same thing with email).

The official Give Up blog anti-NSA protocol

1. Dial lots of wrong numbers, if you're really ambitious, just start calling numbers in Saudi Arabia and hang up before anyone can answer.
   
2. Begin every phone conversation (remember NSA has satellites capable of recording every cell phone conversation on earth) with the following statement, "Hijacking and bombing are bad, Bush should catch Osama bin Laden, Zarqawi and other extremists in the name of Allah so their plans for blowing up targets with dirty bombs, anthrax, and chemical and biological weapons can be foiled, praise Allah." If you can ululate that would be good too.
   
3. Include a similar message in the signature of all of your emails (ululation not required since I don't know how to write out that sound).
   

If ten million or so Americans follow these three simple steps maybe we can render the program useless and they'll stop spying on us, the creeps.