Saturday, June 21, 2008
The FISA compromise
The Democratically controlled “Say One Thing, Do Another” congress is at it again. They have agreed to cave on giving telecos blanket immunity:
The agreement announced earlier Thursday resolves a long-running dispute over whether companies like AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. could be sued for agreeing to let the government tap the phones and read the emails of customers in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
They are facing nearly 40 lawsuits from people who claim their civil liberties were violated and from groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union.
The terms of the deal state that a district court would review the written authorizations to participate in the program granted to the companies by the the Bush administration. Once the existence of these authorizations is determined, the court cases could not proceed.
Section 222 of the 1934 Communications Act forbids phone companies from giving out data on the calling patterns of their customers. It’s a law. We either live in a country governed by the rule of law or we don’t. It should be simple, but obviously it’s not. Instead of the Congress passing a bill that gives telecoms immunity for breaking the law, they should change the actual law.
Instead, they took the lazy way out.
And how did the presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama respond to this issue? He announced that he is now supporting it. Granted, he said he was against it back in February, but that was then and this is now.
It’s not like he was under oath when he said he was against giving the telecoms blanket immunity. For all we know, he might have had his fingers crossed when he said it. More importantly, he is now in full general election mode and he doesn’t want to look like a pussy when it comes to fighting terrorism.
