Dems, GOP agree to telecom immunity deal
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House and Senate leaders have agreed to a new compromise surveillance bill that would effectively shield from potentially costly civil lawsuits telecommunications companies that helped the government wiretap citizens’ phone and computer lines after the September 11 terrorist attacks without court permission.
The House will debate the bill on Friday, potentially ending a monthslong standoff about the rules for government wiretapping inside the United States.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland said the new bill “balances the needs of our intelligence community with Americans’ civil liberties, and provides critical new oversight and accountability requirements.”
The great thing about the two-party system is that when one party is tired of fucking you, the other party is rested up and ready to take over.
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In 2006, the State Department’s report on Russia contained one of the most amazing passages I’ve read in all the time I’ve been writing about political issues. This is really — honestly — what the State Department said in condemning Russia. I highly recommend reading this a few times, especially in light of what the Congress is preparing to do this week:
The law states that officials may enter a private residence only in cases prescribed by federal law or on the basis of a judicial decision; however, authorities did not always observe these provisions.
The law permits the government to monitor correspondence, telephone conversations, and other means of communication only with judicial permission and prohibits the collection, storage, utilization, and dissemination of information about a person’s private life without his consent. While these provisions were generally followed, problems remained. There were accounts of electronic surveillance by government officials and others without judicial permission, and of entry into residences and other premises by Moscow law enforcement without warrants. There were no reports of government action against officials who violated these safeguards.
What kind of monsters would spy on their own citizens without warrants even when the law requires warrants, and then not even punish those who broke the law? Russian Communist KGB thugs — that’s who would do such a horrible thing, our State Department complained in 2006.
I agree with you in principle but I think you have to consider a couple things regarding retroactive immunity for telecom companies who capitulated to administration requests for warrant-less wiretaps, and Internet and telephone usage. One, said companies may have been just as afraid of what they Bush administration might do to them in their egomaniacal thuggish glory days as some individuals may have been, not without valid reasons in both groups. And, two, the number of potential parties to a class in civil litigation, and the potential size of the awards, could bring the the telecom industry in the States tumbling down. The commercial airlines are pretty much doing that to themselves, slowly, on their own and it’s causing enough problems. We really don’t want most of our telecom industry to go under, disrupting nationwide communications and creating a viable, autocratic, long-lived monopoly out of the survivors. A painful fine for divulging the information or supporting the wiretaps without warrant as the law requires, that I would find reasonable and serve all interests the best.
So the telco’s aren’t allowed to fail, just like the banks aren’t allowed to fail because of the subprime crisis, right? The big risk in that is that the fall will be a lot bigger if/when it finally comes. You can’t just wish away these kind of problems. It’s a bit like a soldier and an illegal order - you don’t want the soldier to say “No!” to every order, but you want him to be secure enough to say “No!” to prevent a second Holocaust. What you’re doing right now with the telco is allowing them to get away with it, opening the way to allow them to follow illegal orders next time as well. Are you really sure that next time isn’t going to be much worse?