Slashdot Mirror
New FISA Bill Would Grant Telcoms Immunity; Vote Is Tomorrow
An anonymous reader writes "This just in: a new 'compromise' FISA Bill (PDF) was just made public, which, the Electronic Frontier Foundation reports, 'contains blanket immunity for telecoms that helped the NSA break the law and spy on millions of ordinary Americans.' The House vote is tomorrow, June 20. After all the secret rooms and everything ... if they get immunity and the public never finds out what happened, the only other logical next step is to convince everyone I know not to get an iPhone." CNN covers this get-out-of-lawsuit play as well.
/.ers will complain. Telcos will continue helping to spy.
Film at 11
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Also, if this bill gets to the Senate, keep your eye on how Obama and McCain decide to vote on it. I know I will.
I've upped my standards, so up yours.
Very likely neither will vote on the bill because they will be out campaigning.
This isn't really about "progressive" (left) or conservative (right) politics.
This is about freedom (liberty). Progressives tend to take from people when it is expedient, as does conservatives. Which is why people ought to vote libertarian where governmental taking is just plain frowned upon.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Don't worry about breaking the law. As Nixon said, "If the President does it, it's legal."
In my ideal world, the people who make and enforce the rules would be held to a higher standard than the proles who merely have to follow the rules. It's bad enough when the infraction is minor like a cop doing 20 over the speed limit but when we're talking about the crimes committed in this case, it's the sort of thing that erodes faith in our very society.
I know there are people who say that there shouldn't be trials after Obama is elected, that it would be divisive and bad for the nation. Those people can kindly go fuck themselves. That same logic was used to praise Ford for not investigating Nixon. That same logic was used to praise Clinton for not seriously investigating the scandals of the Reagan and Bush administrations. All this did was let the same shit-weasels get back into positions of power the next time a Republican slithered into office. No. As a nation, we need hearings, we need trials. Bush and his henchmen need to answer for their crimes. A standard needs to be set in stone: we are a nation of laws, not men, and no man is above the law. Even Presidents will be forced to account for their actions and pay for their sins.
This will be part of our process for reengaging with the world. We've burned a shitload of bridges over the past eight years. When everyone can see an American President sitting in jail for his crimes, they'll know that justice has returned.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
This is about freedom (liberty). Progressives tend to take from people when it is expedient, as does conservatives. Which is why people ought to vote libertarian where governmental taking is just plain frowned upon. sure, but you pick your pressure point. voting for a third party candidate in a first past the post election system is pointless. That isn't a crack on the libertarians, but the political system doesn't provide power to third parties (in the US). there is a REASON why the French have dozens of parties and the US has only two major parties, it isn't because the french dig pluralism more.
Call Barack Obama's office tonight.
They will pass it, and the majority of Americans will go blissfully along, acting like everything is fine. The really interesting thing here, and we all know this, is that these tools for control that have been put in place in the last 8 years are mainly for control of the American people, not for any sort of "war on terror" or protecting us from Al-Qaida. The bigger lies are more easily believed. Keep waiving that flag!
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
AC here. I called. Took but two minutes.
If you need a 'form' for your call, here's what I wrote in preparation:
Honorable Congress(person) (X):
I am a constituent (and supporter?) who lives in (your city). I am calling to urge you to vote 'NO' tomorrow on the so-called 'FISA Compromise Bill.'
Any Bill that grants retroactive immunity to the Telecoms is a validation of George W. Bush's attempts to circumvent the law & the 4th Amendment. Please ensure that the law is upheld, and that Americans are given a fair chance to discover in court if their rights were trampled.
Granting Telecoms retroactive immunity is a repudiation of the rule of law. Please, vote 'NO' tomorrow on the 'FISA Compromise Bill.'
Thank you for your time.
I agree I have not seen anything talking about US citizen to US citizen calls. For example if I were to call my mother in Boston from New York. As for the US government spying on a call from the US to Afghanistan...well I think that is fair game because that call would be on other countries networks also, for example, Briton, Germany, Turkey, Iran, and then Afghanistan. So you have no guarantee at all that none of those countries would not be listening in also.
I smoked pot once. But I DID NOT inhale. Will you hire me?
the actual discussion should be covering calls between an American citizen and someone on a watch list who NEEDS his calls tapped
If someone NEEDS his calls tapped, law enforcement can get a warrant. That's how it's supposed to work here.
Stop fearing the terrorists; they want you to be afraid, but they're toothless. Bush's senseless war in Iraq has killed more Amerricans than all the terrorists this century. Meanwile ten times as many people die every year on American highways. IMO anybody who drives an SUV needs to be on a watch list and have his phone tapped; (s)he's far more of a danger to me than any Muslim terrorist.
And some of that "homeland security" money needs to go to guard rails!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
This law is an Ex Post Facto law, making what was an illegal act legal, so if this law passes, it should be unconstitutional as per Article 1 Section 9 of the Constitution.
Note that judges have somehow taken that "No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed." sentence to mean that ex post facto laws that make the punishment worse are unconstitutional, but that isn't what the constitution says. Maybe that is one of those hidden things like in amendment 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
The usual advice on influencing politicians is not to threaten them. I heard from one of my state legislators that he tuned out $CAUSE activists because all they ever did was criticize and threaten, never acknowledging when he met them halfway and never putting their volunteer time where their mouths were.
>you will refuse to donate or organize in the future if he refuses to take the lead on this issue.
And if you do, save the nuclear threats for nuclear attacks. This issue shouldn't be a dealbreaker when we're still fighting about habeas corpus.
How about this? http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/intel/m071906.pdf
can you google? or are you just fucking lazy?
My Sig Sucks
How a candidate acts when it is politically profitable is no indication of how they will act when they have all the power they want.
So unless a senate vote forces the conference bill into committee (Which I THINK requires 60 votes), this bill can go from the house to the full senate without having to pass by Leahy's desk.
Voting for the person/party that represents my views the best is never pointless. If you suggest that voting 3rd party is pointless because they'll never win, is much like saying developing Linux Kernal in 2001 when Linus released version was pointless because it couldn't compete with Windows or Mac.
It is only pointless, until it is not. Then it becomes something bigger than most imagined it could in the beginning.
Besides, if you want to keep voting for the same old same old two parties, and expect things to actually change, then you're insane.
People want real change this year, and neither Obama nor McCain offer it, not really. Both offer more of the same crap we've had since 88. I'm also a tad disillusioned by Barr winning the (L) ticket.
That being said, I can never vote for people willing to take from others for political expediency, or for whatever "greater/common good" they think is important.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I just called my congresswoman. I spent about 10 minutes speaking to her staffer and then her, letting them know that I opposed the new "compromise" bill.
Mentioning that I served 42 months in Iraq/Afghanistan probably got me the "in" to talk to her, but every voice needs to be heard.
The most scary part of this bill is it allows a person, or company to entirely avoid legal ramifications by simply stating "I was only following orders."
If that argument is a credible one in America, then the country is more morally bankrupt then I ever imagined.
Article IV of the Nuremberg Principles of 1946 established the precedent that if your superior tells you to commit a crime, and you do it, you've committed a crime. And we hanged people for it.
Easy come, easy go...
rj
The issue is that as soon as they took the program out from under the supervision of the FISA court it became nearly impossible for anyone to figure out who they were spying on or how sweeping and abusive the program became. It doesn't really matter if they were only listening to calls of foreign nationals, once they bypassed the courts they could spy on anyone they felt like and probably did. They violated the Constitution by spying on people without a warrant, period. When you let your government spy on you without court supervision, its really easy for your government to collect dirt on opponents to discredit and blackmail them, to snuff out dissent, to win elections, and then your representative Democracy is pretty much gone. We've been there before. Nixon and Hoover very nearly destroyed our Republic in the 60's and 70's which is why FISA was created.
By circumventing FISA the Bush administration was turning the clock back to a time when our government was abusively spying on people for no good reason. Since abuse was happening before FISA was created chances are its occurring now that FISA has been gutted. Chances are its even worse this time around since digital communications and computers make it possible to eavesdrop on a much larger scale than you could in 1968. Back then agents actually had to listen to and read everything. Now computers can sift through everything and kick out every email or phone call which has a keyword of interest.
I'm not sure I'm really that concerned about granting immunity to the telecoms. When the NSA and the President told them to do it, it took extraordinary balls to say no. Qwest did and their CEO ended up in prison partially because of his refusal to play ball with them. Qwest lost a big classified government contract because of their refusal to participate, their stock tanked and their CEO was charged for misleading shareholders because he couldn't talk about all this classified blackmail.
I'd be glad to let the telecoms go, as long as the people in the government who told them to do it go to jail, the people at the not, not the people in the middle or at the bottom. Throwing the telecoms in jails is about like throwing the privates in Abu Graib in jail. Its become clear the torture they were doing at Abu Graib and Gitmo was ordered by the highest levels of the Bush administration, especially Cheney and Addington. They should be going to jail, not the flunkies who did what their government ordered them to do in the panic post 9/11.
@de_machina
Yeah but any good network admin would know that sending a message from A to B to C is not as fast as just going from A to C. So yeah it would NEVER happen :)
I smoked pot once. But I DID NOT inhale. Will you hire me?
42 months is a fucking lot. Wow.
One of the real problems is that people are ridiculously stupid and uneducated. I don't mean going through harvard/yale, I mean people actually researching issues. The kind of people who can acknowledge that both our republican and democratic candidates (all of them) are horrible horrible people, and our choices are merely between the lesser of evils.
Access to cheap energy for the last 150 years has allowed our population to explode while creating economies that can grow despite mass complacency, ignorance, and greed. When faced with difficult decisions there is a large contingent of people who have never learned the value of taking a principled stance ahead of time, so they simply evaluate every issue as it relates to themselves, and if no one ever raises the issues, so much the better.
Your FISA court allows a warrant to be obtained after the wiretaps. They have three days to get the warrant after the tap is in place.
So if there's a dire emergency, they can tap immediately then get a warrant later. The rule of law still applies to these emergency wiretaps. That's a good thing.
The only reason to grant immunity retroactively then forbid investigation is that some illegal wiretapping went on and someone doesn't want you to find out what it was.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
The big problem is not that it grants them immunity, it's that in doing so it blocks an investigation into what the Government was doing. Which of course is WHY the bill is granting them that immunity.
First, if you want an unruly crowd to listen, start with a meaningful point that is on-topic. Don't just start telling everyone they are stupid and ignorant. Read up on Socrates, read something about how to form an argument, how to pursuade people; becuase you obviously have no clue of how to do that.
I finally updated my sig, but now it's lame.
Today people are taught to pass tests, not to think. If people were thinking, they'd be dangerous. Since they aren't thinking, they're safe. Do you think it's a coincidence that the school system is set up the way it is?
The rare "thinking" people can't often thank the public school system for that. It is either due to some natural fluke, or parents that actually cared for and taught their children.
This is what democracy has always been. It is the most powerful groups dominating the smaller groups on particular topics. Usually, this is the largest number of people, the Divine Right of (50% + 1), dominating and controlling the minority. Other times, it is the politicians themselves. This is politics as an alternative form of civil war. This is democracy.
Formerly, there was a widespread understanding of this and what distinguished democracies from republics.
[Please note the capitalization below. It is significant.]
Here are two very similar scenarios.
A state wants to do something which is popular locally but anathema nationally. It goes up for a vote locally and wins. A republican (party unimportant) who lives elsewhere may think it a bad idea, but as he is not a citizen of that state it does not occur to him to try and stop it. A democrat (party unimportant) who lives elsewhere and disapproves of it, can and likely will try to galvanize support to suppress the law.
The federal government wants do do something, which has majority support, but that support is regionalized. It would be democratic to pass it and simply force all those opposed to obey. A republican (again, party unimportant) who thinks that something to be a good course of action in general, may be wholeheartedly opposed to federal action due to an abhorrence of forcing a people do what they themselves are opposed to.
I don't think I've been as clear as I could have been, or possibly at all, but I hope that the gist at least comes across okay.
The media also has a big part to play in this, because they simply don't bother to report much of anything really important any more, so a lot of people don't even know what's going on. Case in point: I just checked cnn.com, and this story is NOWHERE on the front page, despite the fact that it has an effect on every single person in this country. I did however find a link to a story about Jamie Lynn Spears' baby. Sad, sad, sad.
I suspect that the turning point with the media came when news outlets started being treated as just another profit center instead of news sources. So now they only tell people what they want to hear, because that's what generates the revenue they need to avoid getting downsized. Who cares about the news? We need to make MONEY!
This issue shouldn't be a dealbreaker when we're still fighting about habeas corpus.
Why shouldn't blatant violations of the Constitution be considered dealbreakers? For Democrats supporting telecom immunity, I wouldn't be threatening to withhold donations, I'd be threatening to donate and support primary challengers. As for habeas corpus, wasn't there a Supreme Court ruling on that last week?
The people who have been attempting to cram this B.S. down the throats of the American public have no shame! The founding fathers must be spinning in their graves! These S.O.B(s). should be taken out into the streets and stoned to death by all freedom loving Americans!
My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my Father! Prepare to die!
The psychopath always blames the victim. The psychopath never takes responsibility for the damage they cause, or admits to personal flaw or error. The psychopath says the most outrageous things which no rational human could ever say without feeling stupid and ashamed, and s/he does so with a straight face. This is possible because the psychopath is simply wired wrong.
Also, that's some very strange formatting and odd logical construction there, mister. Confused communication is also a standard hallmark of the psychopath. Did you also like blowing up frogs with firecrackers when you were a kid?
Who knows. Maybe you're just drunk and stupid. Whatever the case, you are hopelessly wrong in your assertions and anybody with a brain should immediately be able to see why. But it should be noted that the sociopath/narcissist/psychopath would be incapable of understanding why this is so; literally incapable --on a neurological level.
-FL
Actually, it's rather hard to imagine a student not wanting to subject themselves to being a member of the "pathetic specimen of human waste" club. It's a big and popular club and many children cry themselves to sleep at nights wondering why they couldn't be [stupid] just like everyone else. Many people don't CHOOSE to be thinking people. Many, such as myself, had no choice in the matter and I was a very miserable child as a result. I simply couldn't understand the things other kids did and I couldn't accept the things I couldn't understand.
It took me a LONG LONG time to shift my understanding to the realization that my being different was an advantage of sorts... even now, it's something of a disadvantage. I can't use Windows because it's a big mess inside of the black box and I know it can't be trusted while other people lead perfectly contented lives with Windows and simply accept that their personal information is available to any 'evil doer' determined enough to get it.
Meanwhile, learning how to think can actually be taught and it isn't taught very often.
I can't beleive the Dems rolled over on this...
I'm a democrat and I am ashamed that Reid and Pelossi(sp?) rolled over on this like they have on other things.
My only unfounded hypothesis on this is that the illegal wiretapping was also performed on Congressmen/Women and so if they investigate then they uncover their own scat.
Conspiracy theory...? maybe, but I'm open to other suggestions why our Democratic Party is rolling over like a an old Ford Explorer with faulty tires on it.
Beware of those who profit off the docile and persecute the unbelievers.