White House Says Phone Wiretaps Will Resume For Now

austinhook brings us news that the U.S. government has resumed wiretapping with the help of telecommunications companies. The companies are said to have "understandable misgivings" over the unresolved issue of retroactive immunity for their participation in past wiretapping. Spy agencies have claimed that the expiration of the old legislation has caused them to miss important information. The bill that would grant the immunity passed in the Senate, but not in the House.

Comments

Re:How do they know?

[v1]

because when you're in the evesdropping business, everything is important. Every minute you've missed invading someone's privacy is a travesty!

Re:Resuming wiretaps

[ArcherB]

Which just goes to show you that they never had any intention to stop wiretapping, just to throw a big tantrum over it and then go back to spying on Americans the good old fashioned way, illegally. I hear words like "illegal" an awful lot when it comes to things that Bush does. Illegal wiretapping, Illegal war, Illegal interrogation. Why don't we just call it "undocumented"? Isn't that the new PC word for "illegal"

Seriously. Is it illegal to eavesdrop on overseas conversations? That is what we are talking about here. These calls we are tapping have at least one party overseas. Please, tell me: What law designed to protect non-Americans are we breaking?

Re:Now what?

[ArcherB]

...and just when I thought the administration couldn't be any more open about breaking the law and violating my civil liberties. Honestly, does this piss everybody else off as much as it does me? Yeah, it did until I realized that we are talking about conversations where one or both parties are NOT in America. Then I started wondering what made me, and evidently everyone else, start thinking that the Constitution was meant to protect everyone in the world. Why are we extending Constitutional rights to people in Pakistan, Germany, Indonesia and Burma when their own governments don't?

Then I realized. It was the rhetoric. "Illegal Wiretaps" sounds so much more unconstitutional than "foreign surveillance". Bush's illegal war in Iraq sounds so much worse than "Bush's Congressional approved liberation of a country that was riddled mass graves of women and children". It sounds so much more ominous when it has the right name.

It works the other way too. "Undocumented workers" instead of "illegal aliens"...