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Banned
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dc_dux, and to a lesser extent, Charlatan....you're posting what I wouldn't have thought I'd be reading,, but Greenwald predicted it would hapen...
Do you know why roachboy uses the avatar he has selected, and how it compares to what is happening in this FISA "reform"/telecomm amnesty, controversy?
Quote:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwa...ama/index.html
June 21, 2008
Obama's support for the FISA "compromise"
In the past 24 hours, specifically beginning with the moment Barack Obama announced that he now supports the Cheney/Rockefeller/Hoyer House bill, there have magically arisen -- in places where one would never have expected to find them -- all sorts of claims about why this FISA "compromise" isn't really so bad after all. People who spent the week railing against Steny Hoyer as an evil, craven enabler of the Bush administration -- or who spent the last several months identically railing against Jay Rockefeller -- suddenly changed their minds completely when Barack Obama announced that he would do the same thing as they did. What had been a vicious assault on our Constitution, and corrupt complicity to conceal Bush lawbreaking, magically and instantaneously transformed into a perfectly understandable position, even a shrewd and commendable decision, that we should not only accept, but be grateful for as undertaken by Obama for our Own Good.
Accompanying those claims are a whole array of factually false statements about the bill, deployed in service of defending Obama's indefensible -- and deeply unprincipled -- support for this "compromise." Numerous individuals stepped forward to assure us that there was only one small bad part of this bill -- the part which immunizes lawbreaking telecoms -- and since Obama says that he opposes that part, there is no basis for criticizing him for what he did. Besides, even if Obama decided to support an imperfect bill, it's our duty to refrain from voicing any criticism of him, because the Only Thing That Matters is that Barack Obama be put in the Oval Office, and we must do anything and everything -- including remain silent when he embraces a full-scale assault on the Fourth Amendment and the rule of law -- because every goal is now subordinate to electing Barack Obama our new Leader.
It is absolutely false that the only unconstitutional and destructive provision of this "compromise" bill is the telecom amnesty part. It's true that most people working to defeat the Cheney/Rockefeller bill viewed opposition to telecom amnesty as the most politically potent way to defeat the bill, but the bill's expansion of warrantless eavesdropping powers vested in the President, and its evisceration of safeguards against abuses of those powers, is at least as long-lasting and destructive as the telecom amnesty provisions. The bill legalizes many of the warrantless eavesdropping activities George Bush secretly and illegally ordered in 2001. Those warrantless eavesdropping powers violate core Fourth Amendment protections. And Barack Obama now supports all of it, and will vote it into law. Those are just facts.
The ACLU specifically identifies the ways in which this bill destroys meaningful limits on the President's power to spy on our international calls and emails. Sen. Russ Feingold condemned the bill on the ground that it "fails to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans at home" because "the government can still sweep up and keep the international communications of innocent Americans in the U.S. with no connection to suspected terrorists, with very few safeguards to protect against abuse of this power." Rep. Rush Holt -- who was actually denied time to speak by bill-supporter Silvestre Reyes only to be given time by bill-opponent John Conyers -- condemned the bill because it vests the power to decide who are the "bad guys" in the very people who do the spying.
This bill doesn't legalize every part of Bush's illegal warrantless eavesdropping program but it takes a large step beyond FISA towards what Bush did. There was absolutely no reason to destroy the FISA framework, which is already an extraordinarily pro-Executive instrument that vests vast eavesdropping powers in the President, in order to empower the President to spy on large parts of our international communications with no warrants at all. This was all done by invoking the scary spectre of Terrorism -- "you must give up your privacy and constitutional rights to us if you want us to keep you safe" -- and it is Obama's willingness to embrace that rancid framework, the defining mindset of the Bush years, that is most deserving of intense criticism here.
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There is evidence that this illegal intrusion was hatched months before 9/11 happened:
Quote:
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...ceo-not-a.html
Qwest CEO Not Alone in Alleging NSA Started Domestic Phone Record Program 7 Months Before 9/11
By Ryan Singel October 12, 2007 NSA, Surveillance
Startling statements from former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio's defense documents alleging the National Security Agency http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...l#previouspost began building a massive call records database seven months before 9/11 aren't the only accusations that the controversial program predated the attacks of 9/11.
According to court documents unveiled this week, former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio clearly wanted to argue in court that the NSA retaliated against his company after he turned down a NSA request on February 27, 2001 that he thought was illegal. Nacchio's attorney issued a carefully worded statement in 2006, saying that Nacchio had turned down the NSA's repeated requests for customer call records. The statement says that Nacchio was asked for the records in the fall of 2001, but doesn't say he was "first asked" then.
And in May 2006, a lawsuit filed against Verizon for allegedly turning over call records to the NSA alleged that AT&T began building a spying facility for the NSA just days after President Bush was inaugurated. That lawsuit is one of 50 that were consolidated and moved to a San Francisco federal district court, where the suits sit in limbo waiting for the 9th Circuit Appeals court to decide whether the suits can proceed without endangering national security.
According the allegations in the suit http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/fil...kerlawsuit.pdf (.pdf):
The project was described in the ATT sales division documents as calling for the construction of a facility to store and retain data gathered by the NSA from its domestic and foreign intelligence operations but was to be in actuality a duplicate ATT Network Operations Center for the use and possession of the NSA that would give the NSA direct, unlimited, unrestricted and unfettered access to all call information and internet and digital traffic on ATTÌs long distance network. [...]
The NSA program was initially conceived at least one year prior to 2001 but had been called off; it was reinstated within 11 days of the entry into office of defendant George W. Bush.
An ATT Solutions logbook reviewed by counsel confirms the Pioneer-Groundbreaker project start date of February 1, 2001....
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/business/14qwest.html
October 14, 2007
Former Phone Chief Says Spy Agency Sought Surveillance Help Before 9/11
By SCOTT SHANE
The phone company Qwest Communications refused a proposal from the National Security Agency that the company’s lawyers considered illegal in February 2001, nearly seven months before the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, the former head of the company contends in newly unsealed court filings.
The executive, Joseph P. Nacchio, also asserts in the filings that the agency retaliated by depriving Qwest of lucrative outsourcing contracts.
The filings were made as Mr. Nacchio fought charges of insider trading. He was ultimately convicted in April of 19 counts of insider trading and has been sentenced to six years in prison. He remains free while appealing the conviction.
Mr. Nacchio said last year that he had refused an N.S.A. request for customers’ call records in late 2001, after the Sept. 11 attacks, as the agency initiated domestic surveillance and data mining programs to monitor Al Qaeda communications.
But the documents unsealed Wednesday in federal court in Denver, first reported in The Rocky Mountain News on Thursday, claim for the first time that pressure on the company to participate in activities it saw as improper came as early as February, nearly seven months before the terrorist attacks. ....
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Pelosi claims, below, that, after amnesty is granted, it will be easier for congress to obtain answers from telecomms than in litigation...
Quote:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwa...sty/print.html
The truth about telecom amnesty
An interview with the lead counsel in the AT&T case reveals how much misinformation is being disseminated about telecom amnesty.
Glenn Greenwald
Oct. 17, 2007 | Today I interviewed Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the lead counsel in the pending litigation against AT&T, alleging that AT&T violated multiple federal laws by providing (without warrants) unfettered access for the Bush administration to all telephone and Internet data concerning its customers. The Bush administration intervened in that lawsuit to argue that the "state secrets" doctrine compelled dismissal of the lawsuit, but the presiding judge, Bush 41-appointee Vaughn Walker, last year rejected that argument and ordered the case to proceed (Oral Argument on the administration's appeal of that ruling was heard by the 9th Circuit earlier this year).
The EFF/AT&T lawsuit -- based in part on the testimony and documentation of Mark Klein, a former AT&T employee -- will entail an investigation into the extent to which AT&T and other telecoms enabled the Bush administration to spy illegally on their customers. As of now, these telecom lawsuits are the best (arguably, the only real) hope for obtaining a judicial ruling as to whether these surveillance programs were illegal. Precisely for these reasons, the Bush administration is demanding "telecom amnesty" -- to bring a halt to EFF's lawsuit and thus ensure that no investigation of its spying activities on Americans ever occurs, and that no ruling is ever obtained as to whether it broke the law.
I found this interview extremely illuminating, and it reveals just how much misinformation is being disseminated by amnesty advocates. I will post the entire podcast and transcript when it is available, but wanted to post some key excerpts now:
* * * *
GG: The lawsuit you originally brought was against only AT&T and not against the Bush administration or any government officials. Is that correct?
CC: Yes. We brought the case only against AT&T because AT&T has an independent duty to you, its customers, to protect your privacy. This is a very old duty, and if you know the history of the FISA law, you'll know that it was adopted as a result of some very deep work done by the Church Committee in Congress, that revealed that Western Union and the telegraph companies were making a copy of all telegraphs going into and outside the U.S. and delivering them to the Government.
So this was one of the big outrages uncovered by the Church Committee -- in addition to the rampant surveillance of people like Martin Luther King.
As a result of this, Congress very wisely decided that it wasn't sufficient to simply prevent the Government from listening in on your calls - they had to create an independent duty for the telecom carries not to participate in illegal surveillance.
So they are strictly forbidden from handing over your communications and communications records to the Government without proper legal process.
* * * *
Regarding the 9th Circuit appeal and what is at stake in these cases:
GG: If you were a Bush administration lawyer coming out of that Oral Argument, you would be far from confident that the 9th Circuit is going to dismiss the case?
CC: I think that's a fair characterization.
GG: And so, as we sit here now, with the Bush administration demanding amnesty for telecoms -- including AT&T and the other telecom defendants in these various lawsuits - there is a very real prospect, as of this moment, that the case you brought against these telecoms will go forward, and will entail an investigation into what these telecoms have been doing vis-a-vis surveillance of Americans -- is that true?
CC: I think that's true. . . . The courts will be able to look pretty deeply into what the phone companies have been doing. It may not be the case that the rest of us will know all of it. But what we will know at the end -- and what I think is critically important -- is whether it was legal or not.
GG: There will be a judicial ruling, assuming your case goes forward, as to whether or not the activities the telecoms engaged in, in concert with the Bush administration, actually broke the law?
CC: Yes - and that I think is tremendously important even if we don't end up knowing every nook and cranny of what the Government has been doing.
The FISA law really makes it illegal for the phone companies to give this information to the Government, and what the Government does with it afterwards isn't really relevant to our claim.
We have evidence of an NSA-controlled room in the Folsom Street AT&T facilities in San Francisco. We have evidence that AT&T diverted copies of everyone's Internet traffic into that room. And we know that there's very sophisticated equipment in that room that is capable of doing real-time analysis of the Internet traffic that is getting routed into there.
For most of our legal claims, that's enough to win, and we're done.
GG: Let's talk about those allegations. Your lawsuit, if it proceeded, would necesarily require an investigaiton into those allegations -- namely, into whether there was a secret room built, whether AT&T was providing unfettered access to the NSA, whether they were turning over this data. You would have to prove those allegations in order to prevail, right?
CC: Yes. . . . in that regard we already have AT&T internal documents that lay out the schematics of how this is happening and AT&T has authenticated these documents. They filed a motion with Judge Walker saying that those documents are their trade secrets and to say that, they had to say they were true. . . . The evidence we already presented and the fact that AT&T authenticated them takes us, if not all the way there, pretty darn close.
* * * *
The impact of amnesty on these investigations:
GG: So, if Congress were to enact a law providing amnesty to telecoms -- something like the Bush administration is demanding, whereby the telecoms would receive retroactive amnesty -- that would essentially put a halt to your lawsuit?
CC: We would certainly argue that it didn't, but it's fair to say that it would put a pretty large hurdle in front of us for going forward. . . .
GG: But you would expect AT&T's lawyers and the telecom industry to argue that the amnesty they got from Congress does in fact bar those claims as well?
CC: Yes. Their goal is plainly to get rid of these litigations full stop. They don't want the courts to ever rule on whether this is legal or not. That's their goal. . . .
It's certainly the goal of the administration and the phone companies to ensure that there's never a decision about what's been going on is legal or not. The telecom cases are the last, best hope.
GG: In all of these cases that might result in an adjudication as to whether the surveillance programs were illegal, the Bush administration has been actively invovled in trying to block these cases from proceeding at all?
CC: That's right - they made the same "states secrets" argument as they made in our case in all these other cases as well.
GG: And having lost the "state secrets" argument in your case, and also in the ACLU case originally, they're now attempting to put a stop to these cases through the amnesty law that they're seeking?
CC: I think that's right. They're afraid. I think it's fair to say that they're worried they're not going to win with the rules of the game as they were set up at the time they started spying on everyone. They're running to Congress to try to change the rules of the game going forward, and trying to cover up what's happened in the past. And the question is - - is Congress going to go for this?
* * * *
The passivity of Congress:
GG: The claims by Mark Klein about what AT&T was doing - do you know, has he ever testified before any Congressional hearings or spoken with any Congressional Committee as part of any investigations that they've done into these claims?
CC: I know he hasn't ever been asked to testify in front of Congress. I know he would be willing to testify, I know he'd be very eager to tell his story to Congress.
GG: Well that's why I'm asking. These are pretty extraordinary claims that he's making, and yet -- not only during the time that the Republicans were in control of the Congress, but even for the 9 months that Democrats were in control -- there have been no formal Congressional hearings, Committee investigations, in which they asked him to come and testify about what he knows. Is that right?
CC: I think that's right. And I think that as we've been talking to members of Congress about the immunity provision, as the amnesty provision has been moving to Congress, it's shocking to me that they don't know what Mr. Klein has told a federal judge.
It's been on Frontline, and it was on a whole bunch of things -- you've been talking about it -- but there's a sense that members of Congress don't understand the kind of wholesale dragnet surveillance that Mr. Klein's evidence demonstrates . . . It's undisputed, this evidence. They have never said that Mr. Klein is lying or that the documents are phony.
To the contrary, AT&T itself said they were all true and were trying to argue that they were their trade secrets and we should have to give them all back. It's undisputed evidence and it is surprising that Congressional members still don't know about it and haven't asked Mr. Klein to come tell them himself.
* * * * *
Claims of telecoms' "good faith":
GG: One of the arguments that the telecom industry is making, and that advocates of telecom immunity or amnesty are making, is that these telecoms acted in good faith when they did what they did, and so it's unfair to punish these companies -- even if they technically broke the law -- because they were acting in good faith, acting as what the Washington Post Editorial Page described as good "patriotic corporate citizens" trying to protect the country. I have two questions about that:
(1) is it true that under the law, if they can prove they acted in good faith, then at least for the statutory claims, there won't be any liability?; and,
(2) aren't those claims, those arguments, that they're making now [about their supposed "good faith"] ones that they made before Judge Walker, that he rejected, when he refused to dismiss the case against them?
CC: Yes and yes. To answer your first question: the FISA law already has very broad immunities for the telecoms, and if it was the case that they were acting in good faith with an honest belief that what they were being asked to do was legal, then they would already have immunity, and they don't need an additional immunity from Congress for that.
And it's also the case that they made all these arguments to Judge Walker and Judge Walker's decision on this addresses those arguments very directly -- he said no reasonable phone company in the position of AT&T could have thought that what they were being asked to do was legal. It is not the case that this phone company could have believed that the wholesale surveillance of millions of its customers for five years, six years and counting, could be legal under the law.
Remember, these phone companies are very sophisticated about these FISA laws and the other laws that explain how and when they can cooperate with law enforcement. These aren't some rouges. This isn't Joe's Phone Company. They are very sophisticated and know the law better than almost everyone.
But even if they didn't, I don't think it takes a lot of thought to wonder: "huh, the FISA law says that the exclusive means by which the Government can get information is either by a warrant or a short-term certification from the Attorney General in an emergency situation. Huh - do either of these two things justify ongoing wholesale surveillance of all of our customers for five years and counting?"
The answer to that has to be "no." I don't think you even need a law degree to figure that one out.
* * * * *
The motives for the telecom lawsuits:
GG: John Boehner, the House Minority Leader, was on Fox News on Sunday arguing for telecom immunity, and this is one of the things he said in explaining why he believed in amnesty: "I believe that they deserve immunity from lawsuits out there from typical trial lawyers trying to find a way to get into the pockets of the American companies."
Is that an accurate description of your lawsuit and your organization?
CC: No, we are not plaintiff's attorneys. . . . He's welcome to come and visit our offices and if he still thinks that we're rich plaintiffs' attorneys after he's visited our little tiny Mission Street offices, then I have a bridge to sell him. We're a small, struggling non-profit with a very tiny budget - and we're doing this because we're committed to protecting people's privacy in the digital age.
GG: I don't know the salaries of EFF lawyers and I'm not asking that, but I assume it's true that there are all kinds of private sector opportunities and large corporate law firms in San Francisco where lawyers working in those places are making a lot more money, and if EFF lawyers were motivated by the desire for profit -- as Mr. Bohener dishonestly suggested -- there are a lot of other jobs that you could get that would pay a lot more money.
CC: Oh yeah, absolutely. And in fact, our lawyers are just the opposite. Most of the EFF lawyers worked in those big fancy firms for big fancy salaries, and took big paycuts to join us, because they wanted to do personally fulfilling work and feel like they were making the world a better place.
What I tell young lawyers who come to me and say: "I really want to work for EFF - you have such great lawyers," I say: "take your current paycheck, rip it in three pieces, take any third, and that's about what you'll get working for EFF." The lawyers who work for EFF are making some of the biggest contributions to this organization, because they are making far less than they could on the open market in exchange for being able to work on things they believe in every day.
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Quote:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwa...8/rockefeller/
Oct. 18, 2007
AT&T, other telecoms, buy victory in lawsuits
(**UPDATE II -- DODD TO PLACE A SENATE "HOLD" ON TELECOM AMNESTY BILL)
(Update III)
The fact that this was completely predictable does not make it any less reprehensible:
Senate Democrats and Republicans reached agreement with the Bush administration yesterday on the terms of new legislation to control the federal government's domestic surveillance program, which includes a highly controversial grant of legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have assisted the program, according to congressional sources. . . .
The draft Senate bill has the support of the intelligence committee's chairman, John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), and Bush's director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell. It will include full immunity for those companies that can demonstrate to a court that they acted pursuant to a legal directive in helping the government with surveillance in the United States.
Such a demonstration, which the bill says could be made in secret, would wipe out a series of pending lawsuits alleging violations of privacy rights by telecommunications companies that provided telephone records, summaries of e-mail traffic and other information to the government after Sept. 11, 2001, without receiving court warrants. Bush had repeatedly threatened to veto any legislation that lacked this provision.
Let's just describe very factually and dispassionately what has happened here. Congress -- led by Senators, such as Jay Rockefeller, who have received huge payments from the telecom industry, and by privatized intelligence pioneer Mike McConnell, former Chairman of the secretive intelligence industry association that has been demanding telecom amnesty -- is going to intervene directly in the pending lawsuits against AT&T and other telecoms and declare them the winners on the ground that they did nothing wrong. Because of their vast ties to the telecoms, neither Rockefeller nor McConnell could ever appropriately serve as an actual judge in those lawsuits.
Yet here they are, meeting and reviewing secret documents and deciding amongst themselves to end all pending lawsuits in favor of their benefactors -- AT&T, Verizon and others. Let me quote again from that 1998 Foreign Affairs essay http://www.foreignaffairs.org/199803...w-revival.html by Thomas Carothers helpfully outlining the steps required to install the "rule of law" in third-world, pre-democracy countries:
Type three reforms aim at the deeper goal of increasing government's compliance with law. A key step is achieving genuine judicial independence. . . . But the most crucial changes lie elsewhere. Above all, government officials must refrain from interfering with judicial decision-making and accept the judiciary as an independent authority.
The question of whether the telecoms acted in "good faith" in allowing warrantless government spying on their customers is already pending before a court of law. In fact, that is one of the central issues in the current lawsuits -- one that AT&T has already lost in a federal court.
Yet that is the issue that Jay Rockefeller and Mike McConnell -- operating in secret -- are taking away from the courts by passing a law declaring the telecoms to have won ("Senators this week began reviewing classified documents . . . and came away from that early review convinced that the companies had 'acted in good faith' in cooperating with what they believed was a legal and presidentially authorized program"). They are directly interfering in these lawsuits and issuing a "ruling" in favor of AT&T and other telecoms that is exactly the opposite of the one an actual court of law has already issued.
Just read what Bush-41-appointed Federal Judge Vaughn Walker -- operating out in the open, in an actual court of law, with both sides present and in accordance with due process -- ruled when rejecting AT&T's argument that they are entitled to have the case dismissed because they operated in "good faith" [Decision (.pdf) at p. 68]:
Just think about what is really happening here. AT&T's customers sued them for violating their privacy in violation of long-standing federal laws and for violating their Fourth Amendment rights. Even with the most expensive armies of lawyers possible, AT&T and other telecoms are losing in a court of law. The federal judge presiding over the case ruled against them -- ruled that the law is so clear they could not possibly have believed that what they did was legal -- and most observers, having heard the Oral Argument on appeal, predicted that they will lose in the Court of Appeals, too.
So AT&T and other telecoms went to Washington and -- led by Bush 41 Attorney General (and now Verizon General Counsel) William Barr, and in cooperation with their former colleague, Mike McConnell -- began paying former government officials such as Dan Coats and Jamie Gorelick to convince political officials to whom they give money, such as Jay Rockefeller, to pass a law declaring them the victors in these lawsuits and be relieved of all liability -- all based on assertions that a court of law has already rejected. They are literally buying a judicial victory in Congress -- just like Carothers warned that third-world countries must avoid if they want to become functioning democracies under the "rule of law" ("Above all, government officials must refrain from interfering with judicial decision-making").
And in the process -- for good measure -- they have ensured that there will never be any judicial ruling as to whether our Government and the telecom industry broke the law in how they spied on us for years without warrants. They have placed what they did literally beyond the reach of any law or judicial determination. And they accomplished all of that by paying enough officials in Washington to obtain those incomparably corrupt gifts. That's just factually, objectively, what has happened here.
To describe this is to illustrate how low we have fallen over the last six years, how illusory the concept of "the rule of law" now is in Washington. As Carothers put it in his solemn lecture to the Third World:
The primary obstacles to such reform are not technical or financial, but political and human. Rule-of-law reform will succeed only if it gets at the fundamental problem of leaders who refuse to be ruled by the law. Respect for the law will not easily take root in systems rife with corruption and cynicism, since entrenched elites cede their traditional impunity and vested interests only under great pressure.
Americans can understand instinctively -- if the argument were really made -- that it is completely corrupt for corporations which break the law and are sued to go to Congress and get a law passed declaring that they did nothing wrong. That is not an option available to most people if they break the law and/or are sued. But our "entrenched elites" defend it by spouting rank, fear-mongering tripe such as this, and thus, the intense erosion of our country's core political principles continues unabated.
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Quote:
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...l#previouspost
Is Retroactive Telecom Immunity Unconstitutional?
By Ryan Singel February 08, 2008 Categories: NSA
The Senate continues debate on whether to grant amnesty to telecoms that turned over Americans phone records to the nation's spooks and helped them spy on Americans' international phone and email conversations. But Findlaw columnist and Cardozo law school professor Anthony Sebok suggests that freeing the telecoms without giving some sort of compensation to those suing the companies would amount to an unconstitutional taking.
Some 40 lawsuits have been filed against suspected participating telecoms for alleged violations of federal privacy law. Proponents of immunity say the companies were simply acting in good faith for five years and that the Administration showed them paperwork certifying the government thought its own conduct was legal. Opponents say the telecoms knew they were violating the clear dictates of federal privacy law and that no one should be above the law -- especially since this wasn't a one-off request just days after 9/11.
Sebok's argument, however, hinges on the constitutionality of the provision, which would require a judge to dismiss a civil suit so long as the Attorney General writes a secret letter saying the company did not participate or did so only after getting paperwork saying the government thought its own use of the data was legal.
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/sebok/20080129.html
Sebok may be on to something, but even if the provision is unconstitutional, immunity opponents face the same challenge that has vexed them in the fight against warrantless wiretapping: namely, standing.
To prove standing, one generally needs to prove harm, which proved to be the undoing of an ACLU challenge brought by journalists, Muslim groups and lawyers -- none of whom could actually prove they were wiretapped. The Ninth Circuit ruled fairly unfavorably on the Al-Haramain case where the plaintiffs claim the government accidentally gave them a secret document showing the group's lawyers had been warrantless spying.
In the most successful case so far, Judge Vaughn Walker has thus far only allowed the case to proceed on the issue of wiretapping, but not on claims based on the turn over of phone records to the government. Walker's ruling turns on the fact that the Administration has admitted to the former, but never to the latter (though many in Congress have confirmed the phone record data dump). Ostensibly those who were actually listened in on were a fairly small number, but the latter would likely include a substantial percentage of the country's population.
It's much harder to prove that one was secretly wiretapped than it is to prove one had phone service through, say, AT&T in 2002.
If the Administration actually wanted to create a fund for the wiretapped, how could they possibly distribute the money, given the targets are bad guys who shouldn't know they were wiretapped?
Would it be a series of black bag break-in jobs where spooks would surreptitiously slip $300 under a suspected terrorist sympathizer's mattress?
If the Administration decided to compensate everyone whose phone records were tapped, THREAT LEVEL suggest it would look mightily like the upcoming stimulus package.....
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Quote:
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/06/house-falls-down
June 20th, 2008
House Falls Down on the Job
Posted by Hugh D'Andrade
The House of Representatives today has fallen down on the job. By passing the FISA Amendments Act (293-129, with 105 Democrats in favor), they voted to give this lame duck President an undeserved parting gift by passing immunity for telcoms that helped the President violate the Constitution by participating in the NSA's massive and illegal spying program.
While Speaker Pelosi and President Bush describe it as a "balanced bill" with "bipartisan support," the millions of Americans whose privacy rights have been violated by the President's illegal spying program seem to have been left out of the equation.....
.....Republican Senator Arlen Specter has shown himself more supportive of the rule of law than Speaker Pelosi on this issue: "I am opposed to the proposed legislation because it does not require a judicial determination that what the telephone companies have done in the past is constitutional. It is totally insufficient to grant immunity for the telephone companies’ prior conduct based http://specter.senate.gov/public/ind..._id=&Issue_id= merely on the written assurance from the administration that the spying was legal."....
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Quote:
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/nsa/index.html
Obama Supports Telecom Amnesty Bill
By Ryan Singel EmailJune 20, 2008 | 7:28:07 PMCategories: NSA, Politics
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama supports the spy bill compromise passed by the House Friday, despite having opposed retroactive amnesty to telecoms that helped with the President's secret, warrantless wiretapping.
The measure expands the government's ability to install blanket wiretaps inside domestic communication infrastructure and frees the nation's phone and internet companies from lawsuits accusing them of massive violations of their customers' privacy. The Senate is expected to take up and pass the Bush-approved bill next week.
The bill is widely perceived as a victory for the White House, and was agreed to by Democrats out of a fear of being labeled soft on terrorism in the upcoming elections.
Obama's campaign released the following statement late Friday:.....
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It comes down to the problem that Nancy Pelosi resorted to lies because she refuses to tell us why she supported this:
Quote:
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/nsa/index.html
House Grants Telecom Amnesty, Expands Spying Powers
By Ryan Singel June 20, 2008
.....Pelosi said she did not like the amnesty provision, saying the telecoms "come out of this with a taint." But Pelosi added that the bill's required inspector-general report was more likely to "learn the truth about the president's surveillance program" than the lawsuits would have......
Quote:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwa...esi/index.html
Sunday June 22, 2008 06:31 EDT
Time Magazine uncritically prints Nancy Pelosi's "justifications" for the FISA "compromise"
....The very first fact asserted by Calabresi is totally false, designed to make the bill seem like some centrist compromise that has angered ideological extremists on all sides, when, in fact, the furthest extremes on the Right love the bill, and with good reason. Next we have this:
Much of the latter's rage has been directed against Nancy Pelosi, the liberal House Speaker who was instrumental in negotiating the deal -- attacking her on the internet and virtually shutting down her switchboard with complaints. One blogger called Pelosi "disturbingly disoriented" and said the deal she and her allies have cut will "eviscerate the Fourth Amendment, exempt their largest corporate contributors from the rule of law, and endorse the most radical aspects of the Bush lawbreaking regime."
That passage there quotes this post http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwa...hip/index.html that I wrote on Friday. Calabresi has sent me emails several times in the past about FISA and other pieces I've written. But when quoting what I wrote, I have to be an unnamed "one blogger" who is "attacking [Nancy Pelosi] on the internet," because the only people who could possibly object to this Important Centrist Compromise are shrill, unhinged leftist rabble who (unlike real journalists) write "on the internet" and shut down Official Government Switchboards with their "rage." And Calabresi studiously ignores the vast factions on the Right who are vigorously opposed to these extremist policies -- from the Ron Paul faction to libertarian groups such as the Cato Institute and presidential candidate Bob Barr -- in order to demonize oh-so-exotic doctrines like Search Warrants and the Rule of Law as some sort of Far Leftist agenda.
Moreover, the article of mine which Calabresi is quoting, and thus presumably read, amply documents that the Right loves this bill and was boasting that they got everything they wanted. Calabresi thus knows full well that the central premise of his article -- it angered both extremes! -- is patently false. But in terms of outright false statements, nothing can compete with this next passage, which begins by telling us that what motivated Pelosi to support this bill was "a mix of politics, pragmatism and some significant concessions," and then describes this one "significant concession" in particular:
Letting the PAA expire was a risk — the Administration pilloried Democrats for being soft on terrorism. But Pelosi successfully parlayed it into specific improvements. For example, under Administration proposals, the telecoms would have received full retroactive immunity from lawsuits brought by civil libertarians alleging they violated the fourth amendment by complying with Administration requests to conduct wiretaps following 9/11. In negotiations with Pelosi's office, the telecoms offered a compromise: Let a judge decide if the letters they received from the Administration asking for their help show that the government was really after terrorist suspects and not innocent Americans.
Pelosi's negotiators felt that was a significant concession. The California district judge who will make the decision in such cases has been sympathetic to some of the civil libertarians' claims. And an adverse decision can be appealed to the liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The telecoms are casting it as a victory, and Pelosi's aides acknowledge the telecoms are likely to win immunity in court. But they're getting less than they would have in A Senate version of the bill, and they will hardly have a free ride once litigation and lobbying fees have been added up.
This is false from start to finish. Calabresi literally knows less about this topic than his colleague, Joe Klein. I try hard not to use the word "lie" except when it's absolutely clear that it applies, and it does here. Either Pelosi's spokesperson feeding these claims is lying about one of the key provisions of this bill, or Calabresi is, or both. The law does not do what this article says it does.
The court most certainly does not decide if the Government letters to telecoms "show that the government was really after terrorist suspects and not innocent Americans." To the contrary, the judge is barred from examining the real reasons this spying occurred. The judge has only one role: dismiss the lawsuits as long as the Attorney General -- Bush's Attorney General -- claims that the spying was "designed to prevent or detect a terrorist attack."
The court is barred from examining whether that's true or whether there is evidence to support that claim. It's totally irrelevant whether the Judge is favorable to "civil libertarians' claims" or not since he's required to dismiss the lawsuits the minute the Attorney General utters the magic words, and he's prohibited from inquiring as to whether the Attorney General's statements about the purpose of the spying are true. That's why Rep. Blunt dismissed the whole process as nothing more than a "formality" -- because it compels the court to dismiss the lawsuits and bars it from engaging in the inquiry which Calabresi falsely assures his readers the judge will undertake. http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwa...com/index.html
As for the notion that telecoms will have "hardly had a free ride" from breaking our spying laws because they had to pays fees to lobbyists to get Congress to write an amnesty law for them, and incurred some lawyers fees in the resulting lawsuits, that's really almost too extraordinary for words. The amount of fees the telecoms incurred is less than pocket change. And in return, they are having the Congress pass a law with no purpose other than to compel dismissal of lawsuits brought against them by their customers for breaking the law.
But in today's America, it's considered a real burden -- an unjust plight -- when put-upon high government officials such as Lewis Libby and terribly-burdened huge corporations such as AT&T have to incur some fees in order to win extraordinary government protection from consequences after they get caught deliberately and continuously breaking numerous federal laws. It's touching to see the Time Warner Corporation express such empathy for the tribulations of AT&T and Verizon through its media organs.
Finally, we have this explanation as to why Pelosi and the House leadership did what they did:
Stonewalling the Administration and letting the surveillance powers expire could have cost the Democrats swing seats they won in 2006 as well as new ones they have a chance to steal from Republicans this November. "For any Republican-leaning district this would have been a huge issue," says a top Pelosi aide, who estimates that as many as 10 competitive races could have been affected by it. . . .
Pelosi's centrist compromise doesn't just help House Democrats in the fall. It also gives the party's presumptive nominee for President, Barack Obama, a chance to move to the center on national security. "Given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay," Obama said in a statement Friday. "So I support the compromise."
The very idea that Democrats would lose elections if they didn't support this bill is false on numerous levels. They could have easily removed the issue simply by voting to extend the PAA orders for 6-9 months. More importantly, Karl Rove's central strategy in the 2006 midterm election was to use FISA and torture to depict the Democrats as being Weak on Terrorism, and the Democrats crushed the Republicans and took over both houses of Congress. Pelosi's claim that they support extremist Bush policies in order to avoid election losses in "swing districts" is dubious in the extreme -- an excuse to feed to Democratic voters to justify their complicity in these matters.
But whether true or false, this "justification" is precisely why I believe so fervently that the only option we have to battle against continuous assaults on core constitutional and civil liberties is to target the very seats that the Democratic leadership constantly points to in order to justify their behavior. What the Democratic leadership is saying is quite clear: we will continue to trample on the Constitution and support endless expansions of the surveillance state because that is how we'll win in swing districts and expand our Congressional majority (Hunter at Daily Kos -- "one leftist blogger" who spews rage "on the Internet" -- has one of the clearest statements http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/20...407/423/539606 on why this bill is so abominable). The only objective of Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer is to have a 50-seat majority rather than a 35-seat majority, and if enabling the Bush administration's lawbreaking and demolishing core constitutional protections can assist somewhat with that goal, then that it what they will do. That's what they are saying all but explicitly here.
Until that calculus changes, their behavior never will. That's why it is so vital to target and defeat selected Democrats in Congress who are enabling these unconstitutional and lawless assaults. Democratic leaders need to learn that this strategy won't work. Right now, they think there is no price to pay from doing things like giving telecoms amnesty and destroying the Fourth Amendment, because those who oppose that won't do anything other than continue to support them. If they start losing seats when they engage in that behavior rather than gaining them --.....-- only then will they stop doing it. .......
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Just three months ago, Hoyer said the opposite of his and Pelosi claims on friday. They have no remaining integrity or credibility:
Quote:
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...gree-to-e.html
Dems Agree to Expand Domestic Spying, Grant Telecoms Amnesty
By Ryan Singel June 19, 2008
...."It is the result of compromise, and like any compromise is not perfect, but I believe it strikes a sound balance," Hoyer said in a press release http://democraticleader.house.gov/in...ReleaseID=2403 announcing the deal.
That's a significant change for Hoyer, who in March in a House floor speech http://www.majorityleader.gov/media/...ReleaseID=2264 opposed blanket immunity, saying "I submit that a reasonable -- responsible -- Congress would not seek to immunize conduct without knowing what conduct or misconduct it is immunizing."
The bill itself oddly admits that the government's surveillance activities included more than the previously admitted "Terrorist Surveillance Program." That program, admitted by the president after The New York Times revealed it in December 2005, targeted Americans to intercept their international phone calls and e-mails without getting court approval. In a provision authorizing an oversight investigation, the bill refers to the "President's Surveillance Program," of which the so-called TSP was just one part.
That all but confirms what many have reported and suspected: that there was much more unilateral surveillance than the president or his lawyers have ever admitted.
The current immunity language differs very little from the proposal that was debated in February and March, according to Kevin Bankston, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation -- which is arguing the leading case against the nation's telecoms...
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Quote:
http://pol.moveon.org/immunity/080621obama.html
Dear MoveOn member,
On Friday, House Democrats caved to the Bush administration and passed a bill giving a get-out-of-jail-free card to phone companies that helped Bush illegally spy on innocent Americans.1
This Monday, the fight moves to the Senate. Senator Russ Feingold says the "deal is not a compromise; it is a capitulation."2 Barack Obama announced his partial support for the bill, but said, "It does, however, grant retroactive immunity, and I will work in the Senate to remove this provision so that we can seek full accountability for past offenses."3
Last year, after phone calls from MoveOn members and others, Obama went so far as to vow to "support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies."4 We need him to honor that promise.
Can you call Senator Obama today and tell him you're counting on him to keep his word? ...
Obama's presidential campaign: (866) 675-2008
Then, help us track our progress:
http://pol.moveon.org/call?cp_id=758&tg=479 ....
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Last edited by host; 06-22-2008 at 06:21 PM..
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