Kraaze, lots of good reasons have been brought up why this is bad, but it appears you just ignore them.
You seem to be the only one who thinks this law is good, are clearly dead set in your view, have an obvious bias due to your ties to the telecom industry, and don’t have much to support your view other than some vague belief that telecoms should be above the law. Unsurprisingly, hardly anyone is much interested in debating the merits with you – it’s a waste of time.
No, there really haven’t been. Mostly it’s about hating the Bush administration in general, or hating wiretapping in specific. Both are fine sentiments and ones I actually agree with but neither one is served by using the telecoms as a whipping boy for the governments misdeeds.
If I went over to lgf and starting talking about how possibly just a few people of the muslim faith might be reasonably okay guys, I’d probably be the only one with that view. Would that make me wrong? ;-)
I do have loose telecom industry ties but not any that would be impacted by immunity one way or another. None of the big domestic telecoms are clients or even potential clients. I also have no belief that telecoms are above the law. That’s your straw man, you go cuddle with it.
I believe, and have stated clearly, that the government in times of crisis needs to be able to approach private industry for help and not have those approaches rebuffed because private industry has a massive mistrust of government and is afraid that they might get hung out to dry if the political wind changes. Go look at the history of how the government and industry coordinated the abrupt changeover of the US economy into a war materials production juggernaut in WW2. I’d like to think that would happen again but if we start crucifying private industries for cooperating with government in ways that the government swears up down left and right are legal then it never will happen again.
Then the should have done that, but it isn’t what happened here. They broke the law, and they knew they broke the law.
Ultimately this was about shielding the administration and not the telcos.
Go look at the history of how the government and industry coordinated the abrupt changeover of the US economy into a war materials production juggernaut in WW2. I’d like to think that would happen again but if we start crucifying private industries for cooperating with government in ways that the government swears up down left and right are legal then it never will happen again.
Up until yesterday we were still a nation of laws. The telecoms broke them in collusion with an administration acting well out of their legal boundaries. Just because they managed to game the system doesn’t mean I have to like it.
Your metaphor is specious and incorrect.
Except that’s not at all what happened. The government essentially forced private industry to do the illegal dirty work it wanted done. These private companies should have told them to stick it up their asses and sue the government for extortion. Since they didn’t and they perpetrated the crime citizens only recourse was to sue the private compnaies, which the government has now protected them from. Since the government didn’t violate the citizens’ rights I’m not sure they have any basis for a lawsuit against the government, I believe that would be up to the companies the government demanded this information from, who are obviously not going to do that while the government is protecting them.
What have we learned here, the government is free to use the private sector to perpetuate illegal activities and then pass an amnesty to those who assisted them to perpetrate the crime. Yes, this is definitely good for society.
Private industry (and private citizens) should have a moderate & reasonable distrust of government. In fact, that’s what this country was founded on, it’s why we have so many checks & balances built into our government.
Private industry should be required to rebuff a corrupt & evil government… it’s a version of “buck stops here”. In addition, the government itself should also be held accountable. Both are equally culpable in this bullshit, and they should both be hung out to dry if they violate the laws.
Lobbying to get those laws changed can sometimes be sleazy, or possibly inappropriate, but simply ignoring those laws is unacceptable. The fact that you (and a large proportion of this country) think that ignoring the laws is OK in “times of crisis” is indicative of how far this country has fallen.
I work directly for the telecom industry and I do not want any of them shielded. Warrantless wiretapping should be prosecuted, and anyone complicit in the act should be jailed.
Only the Supreme Court can help us now… Aw, shit.
No. The telcoms broke the law. Knowingly. To not punish for them, to in fact give them a retroactive immunity that is ridiculously broad, serves no purpose except to undermine the rule of law.
There have been a thousand arguments stated a thousand ways about this. You continue to ignore them and cherry-pick the ones that support your biased view. In short, fuck you and fuck everyone who supports or ever supported this bill.
Knowingly broke the law? They had statements from the government saying that what they were being asked to do was legal. And it was an emergency. One that in retrospect was probably quite overblown but at the time the public perception of crisis was there.
I haven’t seen such an argument yet that didn’t have an easy rebuttal or serious factual flaws.
Considering how your post sits just a few below my post pointing out how this thread is full of rage and empty of rational arguments I must ask you whether you were shooting for humor there. If so, you missed.
Law is the will of the powerful. The president can negate criminal charges at will, for fuck’s sake. If you are constrained by the law, the proximate cause is your failure to donate generously to the party in power.
And that right there is one of my big objections here. Prosecuting telcos for cooperating with illegal government requests is not justice. It’s not anywhere close. It smacks of prosecuting the minor in a statutory rape situation.
I suspect that’s our key difference on this topic. You are assuming that the telecoms broke the law with full knowledge of what they were doing. I don’t see any reason beyond the typical cynical demonization of big business to suspect that.
How so?
Everything I’ve read on the topic says it is what happened.
Can you suggest a source for me that backs up your interpretation of events, that this was the government using some sort of extortion to force telecoms to knowingly perform illegal acts on their behalf?
I think the reality of the situation is that it is the President and his administration who should be sanctioned here, not the corporations who received letters assuring them that what they were being asked to do was legal.
Even though it sucks, I can understand the necessity of having private business available to the government in emergencies.
They are fixing it, they just aren’t retroactively punishing anyone.
Also, it looks like Clinton both voted for the amendment to remove the immunity and against the final bill (without the amendment). Obama, as he said he would, voted for the amendment, but then voted for the bill despite the amendment not passing. His rationale (that the bill closes loopholes that he thinks need to be closed and that he isn’t willing to leave open just to try to convince people that immunity is wrong) is a little shaky, but not completely insane. If you add the portion which is that getting this over with and out of the Senate while throwing a bone to each side probably keeps it from being a huge issue in the election, it is an understandable compromise.
That is, of course, if you believe that it is better to compromise and get things moving in the right direction than it is to stand on principle and never back down on an issue. If it was clearly better in the eyes of the public to vote against the bill, he could have done it even if he generally thought the bill should pass - his one vote wouldn’t have turned the tide.
I wish he could have rallied support for striking down the bill and kept it from passing, and then hopefully had a stronger bill to pass next year, but I think if he could have done that he would have. A lot of people on both sides of the aisle have to think about the economy of their states and the impact huge telecom lawsuits would have. Many of those who don’t need to worry about that are Republicans who still think that anything which paints Bush in a bad light will hurt them, rather than trying to distance themselves from the sinking ship. Not a single republican voted for the amendment or against the bill.
This bill definitely seems to be Obama taking a Kerry '04-style “don’t rock the boat” approach (and there have been some other signs of that). Since he has a lead right now, he just seems to be trying to “stifle counterplay” - cutting off every avenue of potential problems and banking on maintaining the enthusiasm that drove his nomination despite all his hedges. He is using things like the town meetings where people get to contribute ideas to the platform to stoke that fire. I hope it works because I really don’t want to see McCain in office. I also hope he does some things to show he actually plans to lead on issues before the election, because I think some people are going to need constant evidence of that to be convinced to support him.
You continually ignore the fact that the laws created after the Church Commission very deliberately took into account that a government that would perform illegal wiretapping could not be counted on to police itself, and so a responsibility was explicitly ascribed to the telecoms to reject illegal requests.
Any Telco lawyers who were not aware of that should have been fired for incompetence.
How about the fact that Qwest rejected the requests for wiretapping because they were illegal without a warrant? Again, I do not see how other telecoms could have been unaware of a major competitor’s public actions in this matter.
Kraaze,
If the telecom companies were acting reasonably, they would not be found liable. Why should the companies be assumed to have acted in good faith? When there is a question in our legal system of whether an entity had a reasonable belief that he was acting legally, that question is addressed in court. The theoretical possibility of good faith is not usually enough to secure a dismissal.
In addition, the argument that we should pass this bill because it goes after the wrong target is naive at best. The government has always been the real target of these suits. But it’s difficult to sue the government, because it’s hard to establish standing, and the government can suppress all evidence against it with the State Secrets doctrine.
The entire purpose of these suits has been to get the documents that show illegal activity took place into the public record. The main effect of this bill is to prevent that happening. That is why the AG memo to the court to secure dismissal is secret. If it were public it could be used to sue the AG and the USA.
So the Government can give the court a document that can dismiss the case against the telcos, thus preventing discovery of evidence of wrongdoing, but can’t be used to follow the chain of authority, because it’s secret. The effect is to break the only thread anyone has to ever finding out what happened.
This bill has always been about protecting Bush. The dismissal of the cases against the telecoms was necessary only to prevent discovery that could damage Bush, it was never the purpose. The telecoms would likely have been found to be acting reasonably anyway (right?) so this bill was not necessary for that.
Me too. Far too often, Democrats play not to lose, as opposed to playing to win. And it very rarely works.
How about this and this. I won’t comment on the insider trading nonsense, but if you note, Qwest was the only telco to resist and lo and behold – cut out of huge government contracts. That seems extortion-y to me.
Perhaps the telcos went along because they thought they were doing right, but I don’t think many people would find it a stretch that fat contracts from the government had a tiny bit more to do with it. The facts are clear that they blatantly spied on their customers in clear contradiction to the law. And I’ve seen telco lawyers protect call and ISP records during a child porn case and a stalking case because the subpoenas weren’t tight enough. They knew what they were doing.
I continually ignore that fact? You are the first person to mention it in this thread, and I’ve never seen any mention of it anywhere else in all the articles I’ve read on this topic. In what law is this responsibility you describe as “explicitly ascribed” laid out?
The Qwest thing is a big mess. Qwest was already in a pissing match with the govt before 9/11 so it’s not a huge shocker that they were the only telco to tell the government to take a hike when the govt came looking for data on terrorists after 9/11.
There’s a difference between acting reasonably and acting legally. They had very real legal liability risks for what they’d done. I happen to think, and a majority of our elected representatives agree with me, that those risks should be be nullified since it would just punish private industry for administration misdeeds.
Ah, this one again. The idea that we need to slam our telcos with expensive lawsuits and force them to fight their lives in court and quite likely face huge judgments all because it’s the only way to get at the Bush administration. This argument has never made any sense to me. That’s an awful lot of collateral damage just to dig up a little more dirt on a president we all know is rotten and who has about 6 months left in office.