FISA bill passes House; no retroactive legal immunity for telecoms
By Josh Zaharoff
Posted on Fri Mar 14, 2008 at 01:54:24 PM EST
While the Senate was willing to grant retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications companies that submitted to the White House's request for them to spy on Americans without a warrant, the House today voted to renew the surveillance bill without granting such legal immunity. The House on Friday narrowly approved a Democratic bill that would set rules for the government's eavesdropping on phone calls and e-mails inside the United States.
The bill, approved as lawmakers departed for a two-week break, faces a veto threat from President Bush. The margin of House approval was 213 to 197, largely along party lines.
Because of the promised veto, "this vote has no impact at all," said Republican Whip Rep. Roy Blunt of Missouri.
The president's main objection is that the bill does not protect from lawsuits the telecommunications companies that allowed the government to eavesdrop on their customers without a court's permission after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. More on the immunity debate below. Senate Debating Domestic Spying
By Mike Surrusco
Posted on Tue Feb 12, 2008 at 02:56:59 PM EST
UPDATE: In a sad and unsurprising vote, the Senate passed the FISA renewal with retroactive legal immunity for the telecom companies. The battle moves to the House, where hopefully our elected officials will remember that they are there to uphold the rule of law and protect the process of justice, especially when it comes to determining whether telecommunications firms unlawfully allowed the government to spy on American citizens. - Josh Zaharoff
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Senate is now debating the FISA bill. On January 22, Common Cause did a letter with other groups to Senator Reid opposing immunity for telecommunications companies. Excerpt: We now know that communication service providers turned over our private calls, emails and records to the government in the absence of a court order or other lawful requirement to do so. This violates both criminal and civil laws. Currently, citizens and consumers are trying to advance their rights in court, some seeking damages, and some seeking a simple declaration that the activity was illegal and a court order stopping it from happening in the future.
Killing all the pending cases will have two effects. First, it deprives consumers the opportunity to assert their own privacy rights before a neutral arbiter, which had been statutorily guaranteed since 1978. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act provides a civil cause of actions so that Americans can enforce their rights when the communications companies and the government infringe on them. Robbing them of this opportunity through legislation not only frustrates the pending cases, but undercuts the accountability structure in the statute, which will only encourage law breaking in the future.
Second, it serves to bury government misconduct. Granting retroactive immunity shields not only the telecommunications industry, but the government actors that induced them to break the law in the first place. Despite numerous subpoenas, Congress has been completely frustrated in its attempts to discover what the Administration has done with our private information. These cases may be the last chance for citizens to actually determine who ordered the interception of their phone calls and how those intercepted communications have been used against them.
Break the law
By Josh Zaharoff
Posted on Thu Jan 24, 2008 at 06:46:58 PM EST
UPDATE:The FISA bill that did not contain retroactive immunity for the telecom companies failed in the Senate today, 60-34, and the rest of the debate and voting will take place on Monday. ... In a moment the Senate will take up the issue of FISA--I'm writing this with the hope that the debate takes more than a few minutes, and perhaps stretches into the next couple days. The big question for me and for many of us is whether the bill will contain a provision granting blanket, retroactive immunity to telecom companies that allowed the government to spy on Americans without a warrant.
The issue hasn't changed over the past few months: this is a question of whether it's okay to break the law or not, and whether, if an individual or company appears to have broken the law and violated the Constitution, that person or company will be held accountable. Granting retroactive legal immunity to the telecom industry before the Congress has had a chance to investigate their actions and before challenges to their actions in court have been concluded amounts to undermining the process of justice and rule of law in this country.
That's a big question. Meanwhile, Credo Action (formerly Working Assets) has put together an action center that points a spotlight on the presidential candidates and the debate on FISA. More below the fold.
Opposition to telecom immunity finally growing
By Josh Zaharoff
Posted on Thu Nov 01, 2007 at 08:29:22 AM EST
Some welcome news: the top Democrat and Republican Senators on the Judiciary Committee are cooling to the idea of telecom amnesty.
Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and the ranking Republican, Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.), had said that before even considering such a proposal, they would need to see the legal documents underpinning the program, which began after Sept. 11, 2001, and were put under court oversight in January.
On Tuesday, the committee was given access to some of the documents. But Leahy said yesterday that he had a "grave concern" about blanket immunity, saying that "it seems to grant . . . amnesty for telecommunications carriers for warrantless surveillance activities." This should absolutely not go through. Granting blanket immunity to the telecoms for permitting warrantless wiretapping by the Bush administration would be doubly tragic: (1) it simply lets the telecoms off the hook for illegal activity, without any due process, a result that can only be seen as an affront to the law and to justice, and (2) it would eliminate the greatest point of leverage in investigating the extent, nature, and legality of the government's domestic spying program. If the telecoms are preemptively off the hook, they have little to fear by blocking investigations into their actions and, by extension, those of the power-hungry executive branch.
We're not out of the woods yet, though. Leahy and Specter are hesitating, but they're not drawing the line in the sand, though Sen. Chris Dodd did that last week. Here's more from the two ranking Senators.
Dodd blocking telecom immunity in Senate
By Josh Zaharoff
Posted on Thu Oct 25, 2007 at 12:48:35 PM EST
In the evolving fight to preserve the rule of law by not granting retroactive amnesty to the telecom companies who allowed warrantless wiretapping--i.e. domestic spying--on Americans, Sen. Chris Dodd has made a series of bold steps.
He first put a 'hold' on the bill, stopping it from reaching the Senate floor. Mr. Dodd, announcing his hold on the proposed legislation, described the immunity proposal as "amnesty for telecommunications companies that enabled the president's assault on the Constitution by providing personal information on their customers without judicial authorization." When the whispers began that Majority Leader Harry Reid might still bring the bill to the floor, Dodd announced that he would filibuster, and has been joined by several other Senators. Thank goodness.
As I pointed out earlier, not only does the notion of amnesty for the telecoms have serious and troubling implications for the basic tenets of law and justice--and that if the telecoms are granted immunity, it's likely that we'll never be able to accurately determine whether and to what extent the Bush administration illegally spied on Americans--but it also ties directly back to the corrupting and overwhelming influence of powerful special interest money in politics.
Note how the Senator who forged this compromise received ten times more money from the telecoms this past year than in the five previous years combined. Mr. Rockefeller received little in the way of contributions from AT&T or Verizon executives before this year, reporting $4,050 from 2002 through 2006. From last March to June, he collected a total of $42,850 from executives at the two companies. Two simple takeaways, for me:
1. The telecoms should not receive retroactive immunity, especially when it's still unclear what they're receiving it for, i.e. whether what they did was legal, and what the specifics of the program were.
2. Whether or not his compliance was bought, the clear impression from that spike in campaign cash from the telecom industry to Rockefeller is that he's not an impartial legislator. Until we create a system of full public financing for all races, especially for Congress, we will continue to live with the suspicion--if not the reality--that powerful special interests are buying favors and currying excessive influence with our lawmakers. It is moments like this--when the apparent "best interests" of the people come into conflict with the wishes of major campaign donors--that highlight why having a political system awash in private money is such a bad idea for our democracy and why we must devote ourselves to changing it.
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