I posted yesterday about the effort to give phone companies amnesty for illegal wiretapping. Today, the New York Times carries a front page report on the issue.
For months, the Bush administration has waged a high-profile campaign, including personal lobbying by President Bush and closed-door briefings by top officials, to persuade Congress to pass legislation protecting companies from lawsuits for aiding the National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping program.
But the battle is really about something much bigger. At stake is the federal government’s extensive but uneasy partnership with industry to conduct a wide range of secret surveillance operations in fighting terrorism and crime.
The Times article paints a case where many in the government believe they need wider latitude to perform surveillance. If that's true, then we should be including revisions to FISA that provide the authority they need. This notion that it is fine to break the law (or disobey the constitution or break the Geneva Conventions) because we need to stop the terrorists (or drug kingpins or pornographers or whatever) has got to stop.
The other thing that concerns me, as underscored by this article, is that we still don't know what happened—and blanket amnesty will prevent us from ever knowing. What I do know is that in the cases winding through the courts, nearly every time a judge has been asked to settle a question of law, they've refused the arguments of the government and phone companies and allowed the case to move forward. This suggests there is a valid concern at stake. Congress should get out of the way and allow justice to work its course.
You can read the article here: Wider Spying Fuels Aid Plan for Telecom Industry
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