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.
Edwards' letter to the FCC is a sign of national action, finally
Former Senator and presidential hopeful John Edwards is the first candidate to publicly address telecommunications policy -- specifically, how we should best use the analog spectrum.
The what? As of February 2009, over-the-air broadcasting will switch to digital, and television stations will no longer be using their analog airwaves. What will become of the analog spectrum after February 2009 is a matter of great value to our democracy. The spectrum, also known as the airwaves, are a publicly-owned resource. They belong to you and me, the American people -- and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Congress ought to ensure that the public receives some benefit from this valuable resource.
John Edwards, acknowledging the significance of providing fair access to the public airwaves, wrote a letter to the FCC with the following suggestions:
* Set aside as much as half of the spectrum for wholesalers who can lease access to smaller start-ups, which would improve service in rural and underserved areas
* Require anyone who wins rights to this valuable public resource not to discriminate among data and services and to allow any device to be attached to their service.
* Make bidding anonymous to avoid collusion and retaliatory bids.
A number of public interests groups are congratulating Mr. Edwards for addressing this issue and for raising the profile of the FCC, whose policies often remain under the radar. Spectrum policy is not always the most glamorous news topic, but what happens with our publicly owned airwaves is critical to ensuring that more Americans have fast and nondiscriminatory access to the world wide web.
Senate Bill Makes Us All Line-Sitters
By Celia Wexler
Posted on Fri Jul 07, 2006 at 02:00:40 PM EST
Whenever the House of Representatives or the Senate holds an important hearing or a committee meeting, Washington's high-paid corporate lobbyists are out in force. They always get a seat at these events, no matter how small the hearing room may be. They pay line-sitters to wait patiently in line for hours, and then surrender their seat when their corporate paymaster saunters in, a few minutes before the scheduled time.
The line-sitters earn about $10 an hour; the companies for which they work charge the lobbyists much more. The line-sitters are low-income folks, often minorities, dressed in tee shirts and bike shorts. The people to whom they surrender their places are usually well-dressed, affluent white males.
Unfortunately, the way the poor get exploited outside House and Senate hearing rooms is a parable for what happens inside those rooms.
Big Media, Bad News
By Lauren Coletta
Posted on Tue Jun 13, 2006 at 01:27:03 PM EST
When the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to relax the media ownership rules in 2003, a broad public took notice. Normally the FCC toils in obscurity...except when Howard Stern calls them names for fining him for obscenities. But in June of 2003, over two million people from across the political spectrum took the initiative to file comments with the agency. Why did so many people take notice of the proceedings and fight to maintain the current limits on how big a media company can get? Some felt the media was just plain biased and that concentration would make it worse. I think for many it was a perfect storm of sorts where the public perceived the media hadn't been doing a great job in covering the march to the war in Iraq, coupled with the perception that the rule-making was being done behind closed doors.
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