What do you know, the Washington Post has finally decided to cover the historic debate in the United States Senate on Bush’s surveillance bill and telecom immunity, just in time to see an attempt go down in flames by some Democrats in the Senate to protect our rights. I guess this is good news for the Post since they take all that advertising money from AT and T and Verizon, those big ads that slow down their Website so much.
The Senate voted today to preserve retroactive immunity from lawsuits for telecommunications companies that cooperated with a government eavesdropping program, decisively rejecting an amendment that would have stripped the provision from a bill to modernize an electronic surveillance law, the Post reports.
Senators voted 67 to 31 to shelve the amendment offered by Sens. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) and Russell Feingold (D-Wis.). A filibuster-proof 60 votes had been needed for the amendment to move forward.
The vote represented a victory for the Bush administration and a number of telecommunications companies – including AT and T and Sprint Nextel – that face dozens of lawsuits from customers seeking billions of dollars in damages.
Approval of the amendment would have exposed the companies to privacy lawsuits for helping the administration monitor the calls of suspected terrorists without warrants from a special court following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Senate Rejects Surveillance Amendment, Preserves Telecom Immunity
Yes, and the amendment would have allowed the courts to decide whether the phone giants broke the law, the proper branch of government to decide this issue, when they agreed to spy on us and listen to an administration that obviously doesn’t care about the law.
Why do we even have a Constitution and laws if we are not going to stand up and enforce them? What a bunch of chicken shits…
The American Civil Liberties Union immediately denounced the action today in the Senate.
“When companies break the law, they should be held accountable by our government – not given a multimillion dollar favor,” Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, said in a statement. “The millions of Americans who are telecom customers deserve to know that their phone conversations are private.”
She charged that telecommunications companies “illegally turned over private customer call information to the government.” But instead of “having faith in the U.S. court system to fairly handle these cases,” she said, the Senate opted to “give the telecom providers a get-out-of-jail-free card.”
© 2008, Glynn Wilson. All rights reserved.
