Bush Demands Amnesty for Spying Telecoms 420
The Bush administration and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are poised to square off in front of a San Francisco federal judge Tuesday to litigate the constitutionality of legislation immunizing the nation's telecoms from lawsuits accusing them of helping the government spy on Americans without warrants. "'The legislation is an attempt to give the president the authority to terminate claims that the president has violated the people's Fourth Amendment rights,' the EFF's [Cindy] Cohn says. 'You can't do that.'"
Re:This isn't a criminal case. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Silly gun nut (Score:5, Informative)
Re:They even hacked Obama! (Score:3, Informative)
You do know it was a few dipshits working for Verizon who have now been fired, right?
Re:So which box are you on? (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, I mean, the NRA has NEVER endorsed or opposed a political candidate. And even if they did, it's not like their members would be swayed to vote for them. Nope, never happened. Not. Ever.
Oh wait, except always and forever. Other than "always" and "forever" it never happened.
9th Amendment Too (Score:5, Informative)
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
The 4th specifies the groundwork for it, and the Supreme Court has ruled that it exists.
Also, the wiretaps can be a violation of the 1st as well, because they could chill protected speech.
I'd say one good definition of "epic fail" (as they love to say on Digg) is to have an argument beaten, crunched, and steam-rollered by three Bill of Rights amendments.
Re:Interesting timing (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Silly gun nut (Score:4, Informative)
No. We've criticized Bush for suspension of habeas corpus during peace time. Congress has not declared war since 1941. The constitution specifically states:
During Lincoln's time there was an official, declared war. The nation was routinely being invaded by confederate soldiers. Some may say the entire confederacy was a rebellion.
Also, the war had a clear enemy and ending point (as opposed to a 'war' on a concept) and the suspension was lifted after the war ended.
Re:Silly gun nut (Score:1, Informative)
This is the most historically ignorant thing I've read in awhile. Bush is way, way down on that list.
It's not clear to me that it's even possible to make a list.
A lot of the things Bush has done weren't even (technologically) possible for other presidents. This creates two problems. First, you've got to somehow rank a set of very different violations and, second, you'll never really know what a president would have done had that president governed in another time.
Have said that, Bush was bad. The system he set up in Afghanistan was to pay bad people (war lords, thugs, bounty hunters, etc.) to kidnap people in Afghanistan and turn them over to the US military. The US military would then torture the kidnap victims into some sort of confession and ship them off to Guantanamo for indefinite detention.
Civilized societies have known for hundreds of years that rounding up random people and torturing them into confession isn't not the way to run a criminal justice system. Somehow, the Bush administration didn't have that one figured out.
Not surprisingly, a number of innocent people got tortured to death by the US military. The actual stories of the victims are quite sad but I'm tired of typing at the moment. Also, huge numbers of innocent people had years of their lives brutally taken from them in detention at Guantanamo.
So, getting back to the original point - the gun nuts really haven't been much help on preventing the Bush administration from doing the terrible things that it has done.
Re:SF (Score:5, Informative)
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is the most overturned Federal jurisdiction.
Please stop listening to the propaganda of televangelists. Seriously. The 9th circuit court is overturned less often than the average if you base it on the number of cases they hear... they just hear a lot more cases than most courts.
Re:The tense is wrong... (Score:4, Informative)
Interestingly, the Bush admin is reported to be tracking American journalists' phonecalls, in an effort to catch leakers from his own team.
Government Begins Tracking Phone Calls of Journalists [democracynow.org]
That was back in May '06. Fuck knows if this is technically legal, given all the executive orders and constitutionally dodgey laws this decade...
But the First Amendment seems to want to apply here.
"Aging constitutional amendment seeks job. Superpowers include: protecting freedoms of speech, press, assembly and religion, occasionally acting as governmental grievance liaison."
"Work history: 1791-2001 United States, job title: First Amendment. Fired for insubordination, by leader of Republican party."
Last seen along I-495, holding sign: "Will work for freedom, liberty and democracy."
Re:So which box are you on? (Score:5, Informative)
You probably should actually look at the candidates that they endorse. NRA support for Democratic candidates is not a rare thing by any stretch of the imagination, provided the candidate's positions are consistent with the NRA's stance. As a matter of fact, they endorsed the Democratic candidate for the state House in my district.
Re:The tense is wrong... (Score:4, Informative)
In all fairness, the immunity was injected into a security bill. The president elect and many dems voted to remove that from the bill in a separate vote, but the repubs lined up to keep it in. Apparently our national security is paramount to the republican agenda, unless you're talking about putting the legal spotlight on their rich buddies in the telco. And that's a fair analysis.
Re:If Bush wants it... (Score:3, Informative)
Not in this case. The telecoms already had amnesty if they were presented with a lawful order. Bush classified those orders and the telecoms can't present them. Now keep in mind, when I say lawful order, I don't mean a legally sound one, I mean if they presented the documentation to the telecoms that the law required, they would have an affirmative defense.
If you read the immunity law, you will find that all it does is use a secrete court to discover if the government presented their orders. If they did, then all courts have to drop the cases against the telecoms surrounding that order. If they didn't and a tap was done, then it proceeds as normal. If there was no tapping, then it is made clear at that time. It is set up so that the AG makes the determination and then a secrete court validates it. The EFF will ultimately lose this one because the telecom immunity bill isn't really new immunity, it is a vehicle to realize the existing immunity while not threatening the classified state secretes. And it doesn't side step the courts like they are attempting to claim, it only side steps the transparency the regular courts provide which is why they are against it.
Re:SF (Score:5, Informative)
More than that, the 9th circuit has a tendency to take on cases that are a lot more interesting than the other courts when it comes to people's rights, etc. Challenges to civil rights violations and other constitutional challenges tend to occur in the 9th circuit because the people who are motivated to file those challenges tend to live within its jurisdiction more often than in any other circuit. Thus, because of how high-profile and constitutionally important their cases are, they tend to be heard much more often by the SCOTUS.
When viewed as a percentage of cases heard by the SCOTUS, their overturn rate is higher than the average (about 90% compared with about 75%), but at least in 2006 nowhere near as high as some other circuits (100% for the 3rd (NJ, DE, PA) and 5th circuits (LA, MS, TX)). Source: volokh.com [volokh.com]. The 5th, BTW, is probably the most conservative circuit court in the U.S.
So there.
Re:Not just Bush's fight (Score:3, Informative)
Obama voted for an amendment to strip the immunity provision. IIRC, he also voted against an early version of the Protect America Act that included the immunity provision. When they couldn't strip the immunity and Bush had let months go by refusing to vote on any version not including immunity, only then did he vote for the bill containing the immunity. He stated something to the effect that he opposed the immunity but felt that other portions of the bill continuing/clarifying certain surveillance powers were too important to vote against.
Essentially this was the standard game where supporters of the controversial provision tack it onto a larger, important bill. The president vows to veto any bill that does not contain the provision. Then the two sides play chicken as time goes on and the important bill is not passed to see who will flinch first. This is the same thing that happened with Iraq war funding, where the president would veto any bill with a time line and then complain about how the Democrats don't "support our troops". Bush would go on to criticize John Kerry on this, despite the fact that Kerry had voted for the funding, with a time line for withdrawal. Something similar happened over the budget, causing a government shutdown in the 90s. People in congress are then left with the choice of whether to delay something really important (legitimate surveillance, troop funding, funding government agencies) and play chicken with the other side or to relent and vote for something they don't agree with in order that other good and necessary things happen. You don't have to agree with the decision, but don't buy into the lobotomized sort of ignorant debate that gave us "he voted for it before he voted against it".
So, is Obama the messianic savior embodying everything that each of us wants in a politician? No, of course he's not. And I personally really wanted to see him fight harder on the FISA issue. Why didn't he? I'm not sure. It may be the stated reason, that he thought the other stuff was too important. Or it may be that he recognized it was an unwinnable battle (they didn't even have enough people for a filibuster, much less to strip the immunity) that would likely prove to be political suicide, because the already more hawkish Hillary Clinton could paint him as weak on defense (not to mention an eventual republican opponent). While I think that sometimes a good politician must fight the good fight no matter the cost, I understand that a smart and effective politician must pick his battles most of the time. I also recognize that a president must be representative of a wide national consensus, not the mirror of my positions on every issue. So, given the alternatives I'm still quite glad it will be Obama in the White House.
Re:If Bush wants it... (Score:3, Informative)
Part of the issue is that these are Executive Orders issued under National Security directives, so they are not public records. By exposing secret wiretapping, a judge could ask for the (probably illegal) executive order that allowed it and that, according to the Bush administration, would be a national security risk.
In some respects, if true, this is as illegal as Watergate, but because it was issued as an EO and EOs are by definition law, a judge needs to review and strike down the order as unconstitutional, but that is hard to do when the only people that need to know it even exists is the National Security Council (if I remember right, its 7 members are the President, Vice President, Secretaries of Defense, State, and National Security, Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, and... National Intelligence Director? Some Intelligence guy).
I personally think it's an illegal law and should be brought forward and into the public.