Slashdot Log In
White House Says Phone Wiretaps Will Resume For Now
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sun Feb 24, 2008 10:03 AM
from the can-we-hear-you-now dept.
from the can-we-hear-you-now dept.
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.
Related Stories
[+]
Telecom Immunity -- We're Down to the Wire(tap) 219 comments
The law says telecom providers can't wiretap your phone calls or net traffic, but as long as their taps are legal or they acted in good faith they're already immune from prosecution and lawsuits. That said, your telecom providers are still trying to get Congress to immunize them for cooperating with NSA wiretaps (presumably because the taps were both illegal and done in bad faith). Retroactive immunity wouldn't just mean they get away with it, it would crush our ability as citizens to find out what happened using the power of the courts.
Last month,
Sen. Chris Dodd temporarily stopped the bill, but within days -- probably on Monday -- it's going to be reintroduced, and it's not at all clear it will be stopped again. He'll need strong allies, because he's fighting not just the Bush administration and GOP Senators, but his own party's Sen. Harry Reid and
"AT&T's personal Senator" Jay Rockefeller. So Dodd needs more Senators backing him up, preferably joining a full-blown filibuster on the Senate floor. If you ever want accountability for whatever companies illegally forwarded your data to the NSA, you basically have today and tomorrow to
say
something.
[+]
US Senate Votes Immunity For Telecoms 623 comments
Ktistec Machine writes to let us know that the telecom companies are one step closer to getting off the hook for their illegal collusion with the US government. Today the US Senate passed, by a filibuster-proof majority of 67 to 31, a revised FISA bill that grants retroactive immunity to the telecommunications companies that helped the government illegally tap American network traffic. If passed by both houses and signed by the President, this would effectively put an end to the many lawsuits against these companies (about 40 have been filed). The House version of the bill does not presently contain an immunity provision. President Bush has said he will veto any such bill that reaches his desk without the grant of immunity. We've discussed the progress of the immunity provision repeatedly.
[+]
House Declines To Vote On Telecom Immunity 341 comments
freedom_india alerts us to news that the House of Representatives declined to bring the surveillance reform bill to vote, prompting House Republicans to walk out in the middle of a session. The bill, recently passed by the Senate, includes retroactive immunity for the telecommunications companies who assisted with illegal domestic wiretaps. The walk-out comes after a proposal was shot down on Wednesday that would have extended the current legislation for another three weeks.
[+]
Politics: Democrats Propose Commission To Investigate Spying 302 comments
metalman writes "Wired has a story on a proposal by House Democrats to 'establish a national commission — similar to the 9/11 Commission... to find out — and publish — what exactly the nation's spies were up to during their five-year warrantless, domestic surveillance program.' The draft bill would also preserve the requirement of court orders and remove 'retroactive immunity for telecom companies.' (We've discussed various government wiretaps, phone companies, and privacy violations before.) But it seems unlikely that such an alternative on phone immunity would pass both the House and Senate, let alone survive a Presidential veto."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
How do they know? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How do they know? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:How do they know? (Score:5, Informative)
Assume they recorded a conversation that was important, and part of that conversation was let's talk every Thursday. Or they said we're putting everything in place, we'll contact you shortly with the time.
Yah, that would be true if the current wiretaps were to expire when the legislation expired. But the law was written to specifically say they didn't. Any existing wiretaps expire when they were originally set to expire.
Parent
Re:How do they know? (Score:5, Interesting)
That is the White House line and its a lie. Existing authorizations continue to be in force for a year. That takes us past the next inauguration.
The only case where the administration could not conduct a warantless tap is if there was an entirely new terrorist organization to emerge in the next twelve months. And they could still get a wiretap, they just have to get a warrant.
The issue here is not providing immunity to the telcos, it is providing immunity to the Administration. They want to be able to shred all the evidence of their criminal activities before a Democrat takes over. And they are willing to hold the security of the country hostage till they get their way.
Up till now it has been sufficient for the Bushies to cry National Security and the Democrats would run frightened to hide. Now they have accidentally called the Administration's bluff they have discovered the consequences of standing up to Bully Bush - absolutely nothing. Bush's approval ratings dropped by ten points to 19%. The wiretap issue was gone after a single media cycle.
Parent
Resuming wiretaps (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Resuming wiretaps (Score:5, Informative)
So it's perfectly OK for the government to wiretap someone's phone, if they get a warrant. However, this raises three concerns: first, if they get a tip, they need to act immediately, and getting a warrant from a judge normally takes time. Second, it may be difficult to explain to a judge who hasn't dealt with matters of national security before why the government really should be wiretapping this person's phone. Finally, warrants are normally a matter of public record, and we wouldn't want terrorists to know which phones we're wiretapping!
So, Congress addressed these concerns by passing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It establishes a secret court that can issue warrants without making them public; the judges have a ridiculously high security clearance and have training and experience dealing with matters of national security, and the warrants issued by the FISA court are retroactive for 72 hours - so the government can start eavesdropping immediately, then file the paperwork a couple days later and everything is OK. As it turns out, the FISA court is little more than a rubber stamp (apparently out of thousands of warrant applications, they've only ever rejected five). But this allows the government to comply with the Constitutional requirements laid out in the fourth amendment.
The problem is that the Bush administration is ignoring the law and wiretapping people's phones without getting warrants from the FISA court.
You mentioned that these calls have at least one party overseas. Even if you interpret "the people" to include only US citizens on American soil, if only one party is overseas, you're still eavesdropping on a conversation involving an American, so it's still illegal regardless of who they're talking to (if you don't have a warrant).
Also, how do you know the conversations the government is wiretapping all involve foreigners? Sure, that's why President Bush says he wants the power to wiretap without a warrant, but with no oversight whatsoever, all we have is his word, which most of us don't hold in high esteem at the moment.
Does this clear things up?
Parent
Well that answers the immunity question... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well that answers the immunity question... (Score:5, Insightful)
If Obama is elected - "I haven't had enough time in four years to change anything, so elect me again".
At the next congressional elections - "We haven't had enough time with a Democrat as President, so elect us again".
(Note, this post is not a message against Obama, or for any other candidate. Just pointing out details regarding a candidate who everyone thinks will change things, but who is simply another politician, and an individual person, up against the whole of the political machine).
Parent
I call B.S. (Score:5, Insightful)
Riiiiiiiiight. If you can't illegally wiretap, how could you possibly know what you missed? Besides, there is a perfectly good FISA court still around; you can even wiretap and get a warrant 72 hours later.
Fear mongering sucks. We're a better nation than this.
Re:I call B.S. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:I call B.S. (Score:5, Insightful)
But the issue, I think, is the paperwork. For instance, each application must be personally approved by the Attorney General (can you imagine poor Mr. Gonzales having to review and sign hundreds or thousands of such applications at a time?).
The surveillance carried out in support of the "war on terror" is orders of magnitude greater than was contemplated when the FISA court was created. So Bush & Co. simply decided to ignore the problem and proceed without bothering to get warrants from the FISA court.
Parent
I just don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)
What does Bush want, other than to spy on everyone with no supervision whatsoever?
Oh, yeah, he wants us to not sue Verizon, AT&T, whoever. Well, sorry guys, you had a responsibility, as citizens of the USA, to tell the government no. I mean, WTF, corporations run this country anyway...
Re:I just don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:I just don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the previous rubber-stamp system left a paper-trail (albeit one they could claim was "classified for reasons of national security") as to who they were spying on and why, and thus had some amount of accountability, no matter how tiny.
The new system does not.
If there's anything this administration hates, it's accountability.
Parent
Re:I just don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
You get a warrant when you want to spy on SOMEONE. You don't get a warrant when you want to capture all inbound and outbound (from the country) telephone traffic and put it through your NSA analyzer supercomputer thingymajig looking for suspicious activity. You see, for something like this to work, you need a very large sample of data to compare to. You will never be given a warrant for little Felipe who wants to call mommy back in Italy to talk about spaghetti recipes. But you need that data as a base line.
Parent
Now he says that? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, what a brilliant idea! Too bad Bush didn't suggest that BEFORE authorizing an illegal program and goading the telecom companies into going along with it. Had he done so he wouldn't need to get retroactive immunity for them.
I think everybody understands that in the height of an emergency tough decisions have to be made, but the next priority should have been to move for revision to the FISA legislation [wikipedia.org], not keep the thing secret for several years and then try to bail out the organizations involved once people found out the law was being broken. Don't like constraints of the FISA law? Conform to it, revise the legislation, or break the law and face the legal consequences. There is no other option for a person holding office who has sworn an oath to uphold the law. Well, there isn't supposed to be.
Bush Blows It (Score:5, Insightful)
Bush has his new Attorney General lying to back him up [dailykos.com], but they can't even keep their stories straight [washingtonpost.com]:
It's obvious that it's Bush's fault [salon.com] the PAA expired without extension:
The bottom line is that Bush's own Attorney General just admitted that he and Bush and the rest are repeatedly breaking the law:
What does it take to get impeached in this country? Will someome please blow Bush already, so we can finally get it over with?
Re:Bush Blows It (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
They're playing to cover their own crimes (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a word for this: Fascism (Score:5, Insightful)
The sad part? There is no promise that any democratic administration would stop this.
Why? Because it's fascism, or, as one of the guys who invented fascism (Mussolini) caled it: Corporatism.
The American Empire is dying and it's a sad thing to watch it act, as WS Burroughs said in 1984, as the single greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams. [youtube.com]
RS
Just by way of reminder (Score:5, Insightful)
We were not completely surprised by the 9-11 hijackers, the problem was we didn't act on what we did know. Even then we knew. We knew without the Patriot Act, we knew without wholesale spying on the American public, we knew without the Protect America Act. We knew and did nothing. So now the solution is to spy on Americans. Makes almost as much sense as being attacked by terrorists operating out of Afghanistan and responding by attacking Iraq.
Only a Republican would think it makes sense to fight terrorism by monitoring my 83 year old mom's phone calls.
And, just in case this dust up has interfered with the intelligence community's ability to monitor the activity of Americans, the bake sale has been postponed until next week because the lady running it broke her hip and mom change her hair appointment to 11 am this week because Marge's family is flying in from Montana. And dad still can't figure out why his pineapple plants keep dying in the front yard. Now you're up to date.
Revolution 2.0 (Score:5, Insightful)
Resume? (Score:5, Interesting)
Now what? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know what's worse, not having any input at all, or knowing that it won't be used in any decisions in the end anyway.
Re:Criminal charges (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent