| The battle over immunity for telecomm companies who broke the law in assisting the Bush administration's extra-legal spying activities is heating up: basically, it looks like House Democrats are again caving. The latest: the FISA bill will be split in two, so that the renewal of the FISA law and the immunity provision can be voted on separately, making it easier that both will be passed.
A letter from the US Chamber of Commerce supporting telecomm immunity (pdf) makes the bill's odiousness official:
The Chamber firmly believes that the immunity provisions in S. 2248 are imperative to preserving the self-sustaining "public-private partnership" that both Congress and the Executive Branch have sought to protect the United States in the post-September 11 world. The Chamber encourages you consider the effects on the nation's security should private sector involvement be muted and relegated to the sidelines in instances when industries can help the government protect this nation.
McJoan: "Of course, they are conveniently ignoring the fact that private sector involvement can be done legally, and had been done legally for decades."
If telecomm companies acted within the law, they have nothing to fear.
(Kevin Drum has an interesting perspective on the fight: he thinks that telecomm companies themselves aren't fighting too hard for this bill because they might have signed an indemnification agreement with the government in 2001, making the government liable for any punitive costs incurred by the telecoms supporting their illegal programs. It's really the Bush administration who wants to avoid a court case, out of fear of how much such a case would reveal about the extent of their wiretapping program. That is, if it's revealed that "everybody in the country" has had their calls tapped...ordinary folks will be p*ssed.)
But here we are, we "liberals," demanding that Congress hold the administration and private corporations to obey the legal restrictions of the FISA court, as Glenn Greenwald puts it, "a classically Kafka-esque court that operates in total secrecy," and "notorious for decades for mindlessly rubber-stamping every single Government request to eavesdrop on whomever they want."
At the time the FISA court was established, it had many opponents across the political spectrum. William Safire, 1978:
To prevent Presidents from listening in to political opponents in the guise of protecting national security, the new Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has been proposed.
Predictably, opponents of warrantless wiretapping cheered; the act seems to require a court warrant before tapping can being. But nobody is reading the fine print, which adds up to the most sweeping authorization for the increase and abuse of wiretapping and bugging in our history...
Conservatives like to assist law enforcement, and to curtail espionage; we do not like to make it harder for "our side." But this natural inclination to help out the law must be outweighed by a responsibility to protect the law-abiding individual from the power of the government to intrude. And this bill would turn every telephone instrument in every home into a suspected household spy.
Included among FISA's opponents were the telecommunications companies, who disliked the provision that forced them to comply with FISA warrants and violate the privacy of their customers.
There you go. Here we are fighting to hold the government and its minions accountable to a law that many reasonable folks back in 1978 thought was too sweeping and too poor a check on the government's potential to violate individuals' civil liberties.
FISA's bad enough. That anybody would favor telecomm immunity - thus approving of the government violating the law at its own discretion - is beyond me. |
