It appears that the Democratic leadership twisted some arms and telecom immunity is now out of the FISA replacement bill:
Reflecting the deep divisions within Congress over granting legal immunity to telephone companies for cooperating with the Bush administration’s program of wiretapping without warrants, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a new domestic surveillance law on Thursday that sidestepped the issue.
By a 10 to 9 vote, the committee approved an overhaul of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that dropped a key provision for immunity for telecommunications companies that another committee had already approved. The Senate leadership will have to decide how to deal with the immunity question on the Senate floor.
On Thursday night, the House voted 227 to 189, generally along party lines, to approve its own version of the FISA bill, which also does not include immunity.
The story is a bit more complicated than the Times is letting on. Before the 10-9 vote, Feinstein and Whitehorse, both Dems, voted with the GOP to kill Feingold’s amendment to ban immunity for the telecom companies. Bit a couple of minutes later, Leahy got them to agree to pass this bill which does not grant immunity to the telecom companies. And, best of all, Reid’s staff is telling people that Leahy’s billis the one that will be advanced to the full Senate. So the leadership has taken sides here, and they have come down pretty squarely against telecom immunity.
This is a first good step. Allowing the government to “outsource” its violations of the Constitution to private concerns and then immunizing those concerns from punishment for their roles in such violations is a recipe for tyranny. I’ve said this before, but an emploiyee of ATT can take away your freedom just as throughly as an employee of the government. The only way to prevent that is either criminal penalties — which are extremely unlikely when the government itself solicited the crime — or civil penalties.
It is also encouraging that the leadership drove this change in the bills. it gives me some hope that when the inevitable veto showdown occurs, the Dems wont just wilt on these issues. It would be nice to have a political party in this country that actrually stands up for the Constitution. I realize that the Dems, as a rule, don’t engage in these unitary executive games when they have power, but thats not enough. They need to stand up in defense of the Constitution and that means trying to roll back the damage the Bush Administration has done. This si a good and encouraging first step, but the fight has barely been joined.
November 16th, 2007
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Politics, Legal Issues, Terrorism, NSA |
2 comments
So it seems that the Bush Administration apparently started spying on Americans without warrants before 9/11:
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.
The significance of the claim is hard to assess, because the court documents are heavily redacted and N.S.A. officials will not comment on the agency’s secret surveillance programs. Other government officials have said that the agency’s eavesdropping without warrants began only after Sept. 11, 2001, under an order from President Bush.
But the court filings in Mr. Nacchio’s case illustrate what is well known inside the telecommunications industry but little appreciated by the public: that the N.S.A. has for some time worked closely with phone companies, whose networks carry the telephone and Internet traffic the agency seeks out for intercept.
If this is true, and it does fit their history, there are a couple of points here aside form the Bush Administration’s strange and overwhelming desire to be remember as less competent imitators of Pinochet. All but one company went along with this power grab and 9/11 happened anyway. Obviously, the spying program did little good to protect the country. Which is expected. If you have read the 9/11 Commission report, the problem was almost never a lack of intelligence. The problem was that intelligence was not shared, out of professional jealousy and incompetence primarily, and we did not have enough trained analysts to review the intelligence we did have in time to prevent the attacks. So the next time someone on the right whines about how having to obey the Constitution means hat we are all going to die! die! die!, remind them that the Bush Administration has been ignoring the Constitution since before 9/11 and it did us no damn good.
The second important point in this story is that the telecom companies all bowed before the government, at least in part, because they were afraid of losing large contracts. Their economic well being demanded that they comply with spying on their customers and so they did. There may have well been other reasons for their capitulation, but it needs to be noted that when the government failed to provide strong oversight of their behavior, they ran for the quick buck, regardless of the effect of their actions on their customers, their fellow citizens, and their country. From the standpoint of business, it makes perfect sense. Which, absent strong government oversight, is why it will happen again and again.
Without a strong reason not to, telecom companies will almost always put their economic interests ahead of any other considerations; it is what corporations are designed to do. Markets cannot keep you free, because markets care only about profit and loss. The pressure to produce profit and avoid loss eventually means that, in an unfettered marketplace, the scrupulous will almost certainly be driven out of the market by the unscrupulous. When government oversight breaks down, as it did spectacularly in this case, the free market will chain you as fast as any government. They might, if they are very clever, even get you to pay for the chains yourself.
October 16th, 2007
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Economics, Terrorism, NSA, How Capitalism Will Ruin You |
25 comments
Digby asks that question after reading this:
The National Security Agency developed a pilot program in the late 1990s that would have enabled it to gather and analyze massive amounts of communications data without running afoul of privacy laws. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, it shelved the project — not because it failed to work — but because of bureaucratic infighting and a sudden White House expansion of the agency’s surveillance powers, according to several intelligence officials.
The agency opted instead to adopt only one component of the program, which produced a far less capable and rigorous program. It remains the backbone of the NSA’s warrantless surveillance efforts, tracking domestic and overseas communications from a vast databank of information, and monitoring selected calls.
[…]
n what intelligence experts describe as rigorous testing of ThinThread in 1998, the project succeeded at each task with high marks. For example, its ability to sort through massive amounts of data to find threat-related communications far surpassed the existing system, sources said. It also was able to rapidly separate and encrypt U.S.-related communications to ensure privacy.
But the NSA, then headed by Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, opted against both of those tools, as well as the feature that monitored potential abuse of the records. Only the data analysis facet of the program survived and became the basis for the warrantless surveillance program.
The decision, which one official attributed to “turf protection and empire building,” has undermined the agency’s ability to zero in on potential threats, sources say. In the wake of revelations about the agency’s wide gathering of U.S. phone records, they add, ThinThread could have provided a simple solution to privacy concerns.
A number of independent studies, including a classified 2004 report from the Pentagon’s inspector-general, in addition to the successful pilot tests, found that the program provided “superior processing, filtering and protection of U.S. citizens, and discovery of important and previously unknown targets,” said an intelligence official familiar with the program who described the reports to The Sun. The Pentagon report concluded that ThinThread’s ability to sort through data in 2001 was far superior to that of another NSA system in place in 2004, and that the program should be launched and enhanced.
Under Clinton, the NSA developed a program that was legal, protected the privacy rights of American citizens, and was extraordinarily good at providing useful information. After 9/11, when such a program would be worth its weight in gold, one would think, the Bush Administration allowed it to be dismantled, destroying its effectiveness and its protections for American citizens. Read that again: the Bush Administration replaced an effective, legal program that protected the rights of Americans with an ineffective, illegal program that violates all of our freedoms. Does the Bush Administration even care about defeating terrorists? Because a lot of the time, they don’t seem to act like it.
Dear God, when did life turn into a bad Oliver Stone movie?
May 18th, 2006
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Politics, Legal Issues, Privacy, NSA |
8 comments
