EFF to Dems: don't let AT&T off the hook for illegal spying!

EFF's legal director Cindy Cohn has written a great op-ed in today's San Francisco Chronicle about the Democratic Congress's move to immunize AT&T from liability for its complicity in illegally wiretapping every single American Internet user for the NSA.

Now is the time for Speaker Pelosi to make good on that promise, or at least prevent any further harm. In the last couple of weeks, the Bush administration has stepped up the pressure on Congress to surrender even more of individual citizens' privacy and civil liberties. At the top of the Bush administration's list: granting retroactive immunity to the telecommunications companies that have been participating with the National Security Agency in the widespread and incontrovertibly illegal warrantless surveillance of ordinary Americans since 2001. Granting this immunity could prevent the courts from ever ruling on the legality of the "dragnet" surveillance and from imposing needed restraints. Not content with the sweeping new powers granted to it by Congress in August, the Bush administration is essentially demanding that the now Democratic-led Congress cave in to a cover-up.

Link

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator

Jury’s still out on the kids.
Kevitivity

@ mullingitover: Thank you for not voting.

@ TruthFriction4: My guess is that you are spot on.
Kevitivity

Jury’s still out on the Dems. My bet is that they will talk tough to keep the moonbats happy, but let ATT off the hook. Just like they talk tough on Iraq but continue to fund it.
stevew

The phone companies and the NSA had “secret contracts – worth hundreds of millions of dollars” http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/11/1932207 They really should be prosecuted and fined at least for what they made off of the deals if not punitive damages, and a harsher bit should be placed in the mouth of the NSA.

The palliative argument the administration has been handing out is that they didn’t listen they just logged who called who and when. No thanks, I’d like to see a warrant issued for that information please.
mullingitover

The move to retroactively authorize the wiretaps is an admission that telecoms and the NSA are criminals.

This is why I don’t vote. There aren’t any people running for office who actually stand for anything worth voting for anymore.
TruthFriction4

My guess is that Democrats see wiretapping as important to national security as the Republicans do. If not that, then they most likely fear being blamed for the next terror attack if they remove a tool that Homeland Security claims it uses to prevent attacks.

I doubt Bush really has much capital that he can use to “force” Democrats to do anything. Perhaps there is a bundle of intelligence somewhere that causes the Democrats to see value in wire tapping.
anthropomorphictoast

This congress so far has shown the testicular fortitude equal to that of a jellyfish. As the kids say these days, it’s “full of suck and fail”.
DragonPhyre

only 388 days left until the monkey is out of the office. We can only hope that this idiot somehow manages to remove himself from the earth, along with his brother and two kids.