Retroactive Telco Immunity Opponents Buying TV Ad

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Whether they're mad at the Republicans for creating the mess, the Democrats for caving in, or both, many are still pissed off over the grant of retroactive immunity for spying on American citizens for no reason. And now some of them are trying to do something about it — they're buying an advertisement on cable TV. While it's not entirely clear what good, if any, this will do given that it's too late, at least it's cheap to participate — they're looking for $6 donations. The ideas is that, if more grass-roots groups do this kind of thing, their 'representatives' won't be able to afford to blow them off as easily."

Comments

Re:I wouldn't mind doing this

[Anonymous Coward]

if I wouldn't end up on a spamlist for every new tree-hugging wackjob cause that comes down the pike.

Because being against telco immunity means your a tree-hugger? WTF?

Bad Ad

[wild_quinine]

I've watched the Ad referenced in TFA, and frankly it's not very good. The 'pay to get your political ad on tv' is also not some kind of new initiative driven by the getFISAright crew, either. They've just bought into a political ad networking scheme set up at SaysMe.TV

Frankly it's hard to call this news in any sense, when it can just as easily be summarised as 'Another bad home-made political advert added to a pay-to-play-on-TV youtube.'

These are important issues folks, but let's not wet our pants every time someone mentions wiretapping.

Re:I wouldn't mind doing this

[zwei2stein]

Well, you will end up on "Affiliates with wabcjok treehuggers, not patriotic, possible terrorist" list that government has anyway. Plus you will be on "funds anti-patriotic organizations" list. That's one hell of skeleton in your closet even if that ad does not get broadcasted (Will some TV station have balls to accept this deal? Most likely it will get stopped on executive level).

People tried something like this with Samizdat in Communist times: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_77 It didn't end well for most of them.

Re:I wouldn't mind doing this

[$RANDOMLUSER]

I AM against telco immunity. I'm against domestic wiretapping. I'm against an administration that blatantly disregards the Constitution and regards everything they do as legal, simply because they are doing it. However, hard experience has taught me that contributing to ANY cause gets me on mailing lists for "similar" causes - whether I want to be or not.

Re:I wouldn't mind doing this

[Anonymous Coward]

so, what you're saying is "I'd participate, but I've heard they're spamming so that'd cost me an email address for this particular purpose, which I can get for free everywhere. No, thanks, too much of a hassle, and anyways, that law's not sooo bad, is it?!". no wonder you were modded troll - if you value your email address more than your freedom, you deserve what you're getting.

I'm still pissed too. I've left the D party.

[maynard]

I'm done with party politics. The leadership of both political parties have shown that they are willing to trade the legal principals of our founding fathers for short-term political gain. The parties have acted to retain their own power and authority at the expense of our Bill of Rights. This is simply unacceptable.

But the solution cannot be found in insular political organization. That is, organized liberals cannot fix this. Nor can organized conservatives. The only solution here is for the population of liberals and conservatives to realize they have a greater sense of purpose by opposing the GOP/DNC lock on national politics. Political enemies must become friends in order to oust the real enemy of freedom. And they have a lock on all the power the state can muster.

I sadly believe that our republic has already fallen, and the "great experiment" is now over.

too high a price ?

[unity100]

is the price of getting put on a mailing list too high to pay for a bit more freedom ?

Accuracy

[vvaduva]

"many are still pissed off over the grant of retroactive immunity for spying on American citizens for no reason." 1. I don't think they are spying "for no reason" 2. They are intercepting calls made to/from a foreign country. If you want sympathy for the cause, make sure you describe the issue accurately.

The gentleman doth protest too much

[prisoner-of-enigma]

immunity for spying on American citizens for no reason.

It is neither "spying on American citizens" nor "for no reason." It's pathetic that you've got to make it sound like something more sinister than it is in order to try and scare people to your side of the fence on the issue. If Microsoft had written that article summary, people would be screaming "FUD!"

The truth of the matter is conversations originating overseas from known or suspected terrorist organizations to their contacts in the U.S. may be monitored. Your chats with Grandma about what to get little Jimmy for his birthday are of no interest to anyone and cannot be legally intercepted without a warrant. Trying to find out what next big operation terrorists are planning against us ought to be everybody's interest, and perhaps it would be if most Democrat weren't afflicted with Bush Derangement Syndrome.

Re:The gentleman doth protest too much

[silentcoder]

You are aware are you not that the risk of an American being killed by a terrorist is just about the lowest of all the things likely to kill one right ? Cars kill the most, ciggarettes and burger king are pretty high on the list, PLANE CRASHES are higher than terrorists ... heck SUICIDE is a higher risk.

You American's kill more of each other every year than the terrorists can pull of combined ! You kill yourselves more often than they have managed to do !

If I were you, I would stop worrying about a few people whom you think is fighting a religious war (they are not, suicide missions occur in all wars and all religions, you yourselves send your spies out on missions with arsenic pills in their pockets, the Japanese fought you with suicide pilots - and they were of two religions, neither of which promised any reward for it - the 'muslim extremisms' thing is a great big lie which THEY love to tell as much as your leaders love to repeat it) and worry a little more about why it seems that you cannot stop blowing peoples brains out (note: I said nothing about owning guns, I'm in FAVOUR of gun-ownership, for a reasonable value of 'gun' at least - I am talking about what you DO with them, I'm sure if we banned guns you would just end up killing each other with knives so it's probably a different problem altogether).

Short version: Terrorist won't do anything to you. Other American's are about 500 times more likely to kill you... or maybe that is WHY you are happy to defend the government listening on your neighbours' phone calls without so much as a judicial review ? It's just easier to pretend you fear terrorists than admit you fear the guy next door ? Especially if he has a darker skin than yours ?

Re:The gentleman doth protest too much

[mrchaotica]

The truth of the matter is conversations originating overseas from known or suspected terrorist organizations to their contacts in the U.S. may be monitored. Your chats with Grandma about what to get little Jimmy for his birthday are of no interest to anyone and cannot be legally intercepted without a warrant.

The "conversations originating overseas" were illegal to monitor too! If they're going to break the fucking law to do that, then nothing stops them from doing exactly the same to Grandma and little Jimmy.

You're essentially saying, "they broke the law, but that's okay because they wouldn't break the law" which is just fucking stupid.

Trying to find out what next big operation terrorists are planning against us ought to be everybody's interest

No, it shouldn't! Statistically, I'm as likely to be struck by lightning as I am to be killed by a terrorist. And I'm vastly more likely to die in a car wreck, or by slipping in the shower, or doing any number of other things that everybody does every day without particularly worrying about it. So no, this hysterical, cowardly obsession with the terrorist boogeymen should not be in everybody's fucking interest!

I'm more scared of the Bush administration than I am of the terrorists. By a wide margin.

Re:The gentleman doth protest too much

[ravnous]

If some government official came up to me and told me they were investigating a suspected terrorist and they needed such and such help from me, I'd assume it was a legit request and comply. I'd also assume that the government was the one who would assume the consequences if the request was not valid and I did something I wasn't supposed to do. If it was Joe Blow coming to me and asking me to allow him to wiretap someone, that's different. A government official comes to your door with credentials of authority. Besides, there was no profit in this for these telcos. They didn't gain anything financially by allowing these wiretaps. In fact, they had to pay their employees to work with whoever was asking for these wiretaps when they could have been doing something to help their company's bottom line instead. To me, this smacks of typical left-wing "All corporations are evil, let's get 'em" mantra.

Re:The gentleman doth protest too much

[Shakrai]

suicide missions occur in all wars and all religions, you yourselves send your spies out on missions with arsenic pills in their pockets, the Japanese fought you with suicide pilots - and they were of two religions, neither of which promised any reward for it

There's a bit of a difference between the operative who takes a suicide pill with him to avoid capture and the kamikaze pilot or suicide bomber that sets out knowing he will die. I don't think you'll find many examples in Western Civilization of purposeful suicide missions. Heck, one of our operatives who was shot down during the Cold War declined to take his suicide pill.

and they were of two religions, neither of which promised any reward for it

Do you know what kamikaze translates as? It literally means "god wind" (though commonly translated as "divine wind"). The kamikaze pilots were heavily influenced by both their Shinto beliefs and cultural influences. I don't think you can dismiss the influence of religion as easily as you would like to in this instance.

Re:The gentleman doth protest too much

[bigstrat2003]

Trying to find out what next big operation terrorists are planning against us ought to be everybody's interest, and perhaps it would be if most Democrat weren't afflicted with Bush Derangement Syndrome.

Or, y'know, those of us who believe in due process. We don't throw our principles out when dealing with our enemies... otherwise they mean nothing.

Re:The gentleman doth protest too much

[CauseWithoutARebel]

You don't need a warrant to tap a foreign phone. The forth does not apply overseas.

That has nothing to do with this. The argument over the warrantless wiretapping involves proponents in the administration who argue that FISA requirements were superseded by the resolutions passed in response to the 9/11 attacks. They're basically arguing that they're not obligated to get warrants when they believe that one end of the communication is a member of Al Quaeda or an individual supporting Al Quaeda in some way.

There is no legitimate debate from any involved party as to whether or not, prior to the AUMF resolution, that the wiretapping in question would have required FISC authorization. The argument being made is that the AUMF resolution implicitly de-authorized the warrant requirements of FISA. This is a highly dubious legal interpretation, and one which not all members of even the Bush administration were willing to stand behind. Furthermore, if it's not extralegal, why keep it secret, why does anyone need telco immunity, and why not just divulge the details of the case and allow it to be litigated?

It seems extraordinarily unlikely that the program was legal until it was made explicitly so after the fact. There have already been very mixed results in litigating various administration behaviors in relation to the AUMF, so whether or not they could successfully press this argument is very much up in the air.

Sorry if you hold "national security" to such a low regard. Do you leave your doors unlocked when you go to bed?

I asked for specific citations regarding the manner in which "national security" was achieved or reasonably pursued in relation to warrantless wiretapping. You have provided strawmen about my house and my personal feelings.

Furthermore, I do not hold national security in "such a low regard". I asked for evidence that national security objectives were achieved rather than empty statements that it was being pursued in some non-specific way.

It seems to me that actually pursuing evidence of progress on national security matters would be holding the concept in much higher regard than simply accepting arbitrary claims without any measurable evidence of success.

Congress has made it perfectly clear that such wiretapping is NOT illegal.

First of all, my commentary is not immature, it is simply opinionated. I'm under no obligation to be even-handed here, and you shouldn't assume that I'm going to be. I oppose excessive government powers of any stripe, and if secretly wiretapping citizens and refusing to allow any meaningful oversight isn't an excessive power, I don't know what is.

Second of all, Congress only made it explicitly legal after it was discovered. Whether or not it was legal before that is highly debatable, and whether or not it's legal now is still not entirely certain. Congress has attempted to bail out illegal administration practices before and had their laws slapped down by the courts on Constitutional grounds. One of the major arguments against this practice is that it's a Constitutional violation.

If it bothers you, however, I could call it unethical wiretapping. That's a clear matter of opinion.

And, as a footnote to all this, we haven't even touched on one crucial component of the argument: what was wrong with the existing FISA provisions anyway?

Re:The gentleman doth protest too much

[Anonymous Coward]

Interestingly enough, it's not the direct personal threat of bodily harm by a terrorist that is at stake. It the puncture in national sovereignty that such an attack would produce, along with the resulting economic havoc it would create. And THAT would hurt us all.

This is why the tactics of groups like Al Quaeda are called "asymmetric warfare." They are not trying to rack up a body count, hence the low chance of personal physical injury. They are trying to create a host of other effects, and it works.

Short answer: you're an idiot.

Re:The gentleman doth protest too much

[prisoner-of-enigma]

You are aware are you not that the risk of an American being killed by a terrorist is just about the lowest of all the things likely to kill one right ?

Have you stopped to consider this might be the logical outcome of a pro-active intelligence gathering policy just like the one you're currently attacking? The argument you are making is analogous to saying "I don't know why I bother securing my servers anymore since they never get rooted!"

As I've stated elsewhere in other posts, I'm in the U.S. Marine Corps. I've been in Iraq. I'm willing to bet you haven't. I'm also in the intel branch. You have no idea how many bad guy ops are stopped long before a bomb goes off. And you never, ever hear about it because the terrorists didn't pull off their objective. So you can smugly sit there at your keyboard feeling all safe and happy, knowing that you're far more likely to die from Burger King cholesterol than from a terrorist plot. You can do that because people you despise and denigrate are using methods you abhor to protect you from your naivete. You're welcome.

Re:The gentleman doth protest too much

[prisoner-of-enigma]

RESOLVE your differences and come to peaceful agreements.

Pray tell, how does one come to a "peaceful agreement" with a group that has, as a stated purpose of their charter, a mission to either convert, enslave, or murder anyone who does not follow their faith? What comfortable middle ground would you be willing to accept, the murder of only half of us infidels?

Peaceful agreements require both sides to be willing to compromise. The Islamists are, by their own statements, unwilling to compromise on anything at all. That alone makes negotiations predestined to fail, yet you make it seem like we're the ones who are failing to live up to your lofty standards.

And if you think the U.S. isn't at least indirectly related to the current and/or former security of South Africa, you're more naive than I originally took you for. Communist rebels funded by the Soviets were actively seeking to topple the S.A. government and replace it with your typical Africa thug-style dictatorship reporting to Moscow. The U.S. and, to a larger extent, all of NATO worked directly and indirectly against that. So, I'll again say "you're welcome" even though you're too proud and too full of yourself to say "thank you."

Re:Congress Writes the Laws...

[AndersOSU]

While the democrats are certainly not blameless (especially Pelosi and Reed) you might notice that only one republican congress person (Johnson R-IL) and not a single republican senator voted against this bill.

Re:It's just a bunch of lawyers.

[intx13]

Left wing leaders don't care about the spying. They just want another set of excuses to try and destroy the American economy even more than all their environmental regulation already has.

Ah yes, because all those career Democrat politicians are spending their lives working for a government that they are secretly trying to destroy via an economic collapse. Sounds reasonable to me! Seriously, drop the conspiracy theories and realize that everybody thinks they're doing the Right Thing. The problem is that, like practically anybody who has nothing else to do but talk about politics all day, they're idiots and have no idea what they're doing. But there's no vast left-wing conspiracy to take down the American economy.

Correction

[crmarvin42]

many are still pissed off over the grant of retroactive immunity for spying on American citizens for no reason

many are still pissed off over the grant of retroactive immunity for spying on American citizens for no good reason

Their was a reason for the spying. You may think it was good, most Slashdot members appear to believe that it was not a good reason, but a reason was given (after the fact). That reason being, they were spying on international calls believed to be involved in terrorism.

I'm not defending the ISP's or the Government, but the original post is misleading IMO.

Re:Correction

[ArcherB]

many are still pissed off over the grant of retroactive immunity for spying on American citizens for no reason

many are still pissed off over the grant of retroactive immunity for spying on American citizens for no good reason

Their was a reason for the spying. You may think it was good, most Slashdot members appear to believe that it was not a good reason, but a reason was given (after the fact). That reason being, they were spying on international calls believed to be involved in terrorism.

I'm not defending the ISP's or the Government, but the original post is misleading IMO.

I agree completely. I can think of 3000+ good reasons. Actually, that's not true because those 3000+ are dead and gone.

I can think of 300,000,000 reasons.

Don't get me wrong, there are valid complaints against the bill, but when you start out saying obvious lies like, "for no reason", you lose all credibility.

Besides, this seems like a money grab to me. They are trying to raise money to bribe...er... lobby congress people. If the telecom bill were THAT unpopular, these asshats in congress would be voted out, as that would be the "will of the people". Since they won't be, it's safe to assume that the American public either supports the telecom bill or simply doesn't care enough to make it a voting issue. So it seems to me that this group is trying to raise money to usurp the will of "We The People" in the name of the Constitution. Something is not right there.

Re:Congress Writes the Laws...

[Kingrames]

Show us the percentage of republicans who voted for and against and the percentage of democrats, and point out the democrats who are only democrat in name, like Pelosi.

Re:I'm not paying.

[bigstrat2003]

In general going against the Immunity is saying I hate big companies because they have more money then I do.

Bullshit. It's saying that you support upholding of the law. No one gets to break the law just because someone says it's ok.

Having them fined or jailed will do nothing positive.

No more or less positive than punishing anyone else who breaks the law. They broke the law, so let them be punished.

Responsibilities

[tjstork]

i agree the bailing out of the banks and all the crap they are pull

The problem is one of moral hazard and responsibilities of both political parties. Republicans are supposed to be the bulwark against the excesses of Washington and they've honestly been terrible.

The expansion of the budget deficit under Bush, and I am a Republican, has been utterly foolish and wasteful. The bottom line is, Democrats are the ones that are supposed to be the ones that want to tax and spend and, even if sometimes it is needed, they are the ones that should do that.

But, the real problem is that, if you've got the Feds bailing out a bunch of banks - and the sweetheart deal for Bear Sterns so that rich people could keep some of their stock, was utterly wrong. If the Fed can come up with 200 billion to bail out rich people, its basic fairness that advocates for the left wing and the poor might ask , geez, maybe they should be able to get some money to bail them out too. So, we need to have some leadership in Washington that is capable of saying no, and Bush just isn't doing the job.

I almost welcome an Obama Presidency so that those Republicans in the Congress that had the courage to vote against this bailout will be the Republicans we rebuild our party around, and in doing so, I should hope we focus on the positive messages of free enterprise, individual thrift and responsibility, or at least an acceptance of one's own failures, and less on ridiculous and wrong headed crap like picking on gays and supposed national security.

Re:Congress Writes the Laws...

[jackbird]

Usually law enforcement grants a person or entity immunity in order to get them to name names and enable prosecution of folks higher up the food chain. Granting unconditional immunity is nothing more than a cover-up.

Re:Misplaced Anger

[kneemoe]

Is it really misplaced though?
If the administration had gone to your local mafia syndicate and asked them to rough you up to get some information out of you, is the administration the only one to blame? I know its a tad hyperbolic, but what about those wonderful nuremberg trials? We held people accountable for their own actions, orders be damned. So why are we supposed to give these (corporations as people) people a pass?
BOTH the administration AND the telcos broke the law, and BOTH should be held accountable, whether or not they are is a different story.

George Bush is ... Batman!!

[tiananmen tank man]

In a weird art imitates life senerio, this summer's hollywood movie Batman has him doing cell phone evesdroping on the entire city to catch the Joker.