Why Keisler

Wildarseguess here. But I have a hypothesis for why Bush pulled his Clement-Keisler headfake this morning.

Recall that, just last week, BushCo made an unusual intervention into the FCC’s deliberations over Net Neutrality.

Well, a lot of people have noted that Keisler’s most notable achievement at DOJ was his role in spiking the tobacco settlement. Now, combine what that says about Keisler’s personality: that he’s willing to abuse the legal process to help out big corporate donors, with this case that he argued for AT&T back when he worked for Sidley & Austin, where Keisler worked in Telecom law.

The Second Circuit recently held in AT&T v. Conboy that transfers of personal information collected by a company do notnecessarily cause injury or give rise to cognizable damages. PeterKeisler of Sidley & Austin argued the case on behalf of AT&T.The decision was announced on February 26, 2001.

AT&Tprevailed over plaintiffs who claimed AT&T had improperly distributed theircustomer proprietary network information (�CPNI�) to AT&T�s former creditcard branch, Universal Card Service (�UCS�), in order to assist in credit-carddebt collection. The Conboys accusedAT&T of obtaining the information through its role as their long-distanceservice provider. The informationallegedly disclosed consisted of their names, unlisted telephone number,billing address, and details of their long-distance calls.

Gosh. I wonder if DOJ is going to be dealing with anything similar in the near future? You think maybe Bush was trying to get a good friend of Telecom in the AG seat as he attempts to ram through further amendments to FISA, most notably immunity for the Telecoms for … providing customer pen data to people who shouldn’t have had it?