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October 10, 2007
Congress Urged to Shut Up and Make With the Telco Immunity
Washington Post — Bush Threatens Veto of Eavesdropping Bill:
President Bush said Wednesday that he will not sign a new eavesdropping bill if it does not grant retroactive immunity to U.S. telecommunications companies that helped conduct electronic surveillance without court orders.
The holdup:
A top Democratic leader opened the door on Tuesday to allowing an immunity provision. But House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said the Bush administration must first detail what the companies did. About 40 pending lawsuits name telecommunications companies for alleged violations of wiretapping laws.
I’ll put my cards on the table and admit that I’m not even comfortable with granting retroactive immunity once we find out what the telcos were up to. Not where fundamental issues regarding civil liberties are concerned.
If AT&T screwed up some regulatory filing one year because of a badly written law, I’d be all for Congress refunding the resulting fine the next year when it changed the law. But when we move into an area where agents of the government who don’t even represent our lawmakers present themselves to telcos and secure compliance with activities of dubious legality — or clear illegality — there should be no sense that acquiescence is a can’t-lose proposition.
How do we call ourselves a country that respects the rule of law when our legislators are told, in effect, to shut up and grant immunity to suspected lawbreakers without even knowing what they did?
We can’t, because the entire point of the president’s position is that if the executive decides something’s legal, then it must be. At that point, Congress’ job degenerates into sitting around waiting to clean up discrepancies between executive fiat and established law. If you believe the fundamental organizing principles of American government are sound, you can see the problem with that mindset.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, the key issue here is the extent to which briefing in Congress represents a threat to ongoing legitimate surveillance operations. The apparent administration stance is that any amount of disclosure will harm operations, and so whatever our intelligence apparatus is up to is best left to the executive to worry about. But if our system is so badly broken that one entire branch is supposed to recuse itself from issues of national security, then FISA is the last thing we need to be “improving”: We need to be figuring out how to fix what the executive branch is representing to be a horribly broken relationship between lawmakers and intelligence operatives who are supposed to be operating within laws designed to preserve not only our precious hides, but our democratic values.
Elsewhere
You can read more about the current legislative wrangling with Threat Level's summary of what the White House is resisting:
Only three amendments were made to the bill. One clarifies that the administration can't use the bill's looser "basket warrants," intended to make it easier to snoop from inside the United States on people believed to be overseas, to find a way to actual target American citizens inside the U.S. Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D- New York) won approval of an amendment ordering the secret spy court to make sure the NSA complies with its orders, as opposed to simply authorizing them to do so. A final amendment requires that the reports to Congress ordered by the bill also include information on what purposes other than gathering foreign intelligence the NSA has for spying.
Posted by mhall at 6:51 PM | Add Comment
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