Telecom Amnesty: Where's the outrage?

Great Debates
21

Let’s put it this way: I sure wouldn’t vote for either of them against someone who would put a hold on this bill.

Since the likelihood that any of the GOP candidates is going to be any more respectful of Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights, or any less desirous of granting immunity to the telecoms, than Hillary or Obama would be, I will almost surely have to distinguish between the ultimate winners of the major-party nominations on other grounds. There are huge differences between the GOP candidates and even a corporatist, hawkish Dem like Hillary, on such issues as health care and (in all likelihood) global warming.

But in the wake of Harry Reid’s apparent decision to ignore Dodd’s hold on the FISA bill, I’ve called up the DNC, the DSCC, and the DCCC, and asked them to take me off their phone and mailing lists. The money of mine that would normally go to general election campaigns, is mostly going to go to primary challengers this cycle, starting with Donna Edwards, who is challenging worthless Rep. Al Wynn here in MD.

22

If true–and it’s looking more likely than not–Reid’s actions sicken me. I am so tired of this Senate complaining about “needing 60 votes”, of Senators like Clinton and Obama who issue manufactured statements of opposition to this or that bill, but do nothing to stop its passage. Sure they’ll vote against it–to enhance their standing among the base with primaries coming up–but it’s a worthless opposition knowing that the leadership will whip its freshman Senators into voting for it.

Senators Obama and Clinton want to be president. OK, then why not lead on this issue like Dodd and oppose a Senate leadership determined to thwart the rule of law here?

Whether or not this improves Dodd’s standing as a presidential candidate, it at least gives me a reason to listen to him more, and to encourage others to do the same. To borrow a sports analogy (like there aren’t enough of those in presidential politics), Senators Clinton and Obama are playing not to lose, Dodd is playing to win. I don’t know whether he’s make a better president, but he’s at least got the right idea of what a leader should be.

23

I wonder how much of this seeming apathy stems from most people not really getting it. Most of us simply call our mom or SO or friends once in awhile. To many they probably figure if the government wants to sort through those calls big deal right? And if they can catch a bad guy so much the better!

I am not one of those people mind you but even some people who do understand the larger issues seem somewhat nonplussed by it. I discussed this with my mom and she is a smart and savvy lady. She gets it. She doesn’t care. To her she is law abiding and anything to catch bad guys is good. To her the perceived threat of terrorists is more than enough for her to not care about an issue like this. To her it can only help her and never hurt her. If she didn’t read about it in the paper she’d likely never even know it happened.

24

I wouldn’t, as a matter of fact. I suspect voter turnout will be very low among the Democrats.

25

While I disagree that the intrusion is not a big deal, I’m sure your mother would agree that we should make decisions about the policy in an open and public manner.

The reason rights like the Fourth Amendment are enshrined in the constitution is to prevent these rights from being subject to the whim of a powerful majority; they’re fundamental to the individual, so the individual should be allowed to decide whether or not he/she will surrender them. In your mother’s case, she sees no problem surrendering her rights in this circumstance–perhaps because she feels it will improve the chances of catching catch a bad guy–and I’m not about to argue with her right to do that. She should also recognize, however, that others may feel differently, so the principle at stake here is not her rights, but her respect of others’ ability to exercise their rights.

When Madison describes the Bill of Rights as a “protection against the tyranny of the majority”, I think most of us imagine a majority united by some strong emotion/belief that moves them to brutally and violently trample the rights of a disliked minority–think lynching or organized book-burning. That makes it easy to overlook apathy as a potential seed of tyrrany, but if enough people are united in their apathy (an ironic and perhaps oxymoronic idea), that callousness can lead to a brutality to match any minority purge.

26

Obama’s campaign originally announced the senator would support a filibuster of the FISA bill “as it stands now”, then clarified in a follow-up:

A short time later, Clinton’s campaign joined the action:

Not quite unqualified opposition like Obama’s, but something at least.

The Clinton article mentions that Senator Joe Biden has also jumped on-board (perhaps earlier than the two above), though I can’t find a statement from his campaign to this effect.

I’m glad this is getting traction with those senators who are campaigning to be leader of the free world.

One of the things that bothers me about the campaign process is that many of these campaigners are federally elected officials right now, which means they have the power to lead right now (not, obviously, as effectively as the president, but still). Many of them though seem to have all these great plans for what they will do in 2009, but I don’t think that should preclude their ability to exercise some of that power right now.

I know they don’t want to cast some decisive vote or make a provocative statement for fear it will come back to haunt them in the general election, but at this point if you’re a democrat and you don’t vigorously oppose the policies of a republican president with an approval rating in the 20’s, I have to wonder what kind of leader you would be as president. I mean, does anyone think the general election itself is going to be anything other than a Democratic cakewalk? Just keep mentioning whatever Republican candidate you’re running against in the same sentence with George Bush, keep asking him/her “Do you support Bush’s plan to…”, and you absolutely cannot lose.

27

I’ve read this paragraph three times and every time I hear a deep, sepulchral voice intoning “FAMOUS LAST WORDS”…

It’s a deadly mistake to get too confident this far ahead of the game. No one thought the Democrats had a chance in 2006 until the Foley story broke at the end of last September. Then the Republicans’ house came tumbling down brick by brick practically the whole way up to election day. Declaring the Democrats the winners of 2008 in 2007 is foolish. We have no idea what’s going to come up in the next 370-odd days.

28

With all due respect, you have a flawed memory regarding the outcome of the 2006 election. CNN, for example, showed Democratic congressional candidates with an overall lead in polling throughout 2006, not just after the Foley scandal. You could make a case that the botched Republican reaction to the Foley scandal led to turnover, but clearly the Dems had more than a slim chance prior to late September. This poll site projected widespread Dem gains in the House, Senate, and Statehouses two weeks prior to the Foley scandal.

And frankly, it’s not “over-confidence” to underscore the deep unpopularity of this president, especially when the general election is more than a year away (the Foley scandal happened only a month or two before the 2006 general, not enough time for it to disappear down the memory hole). Over-hesitation can be a deadly mistake as well; if you can’t stand up to this president, what kind of a president should we think you will be?

29

As a telcom lawyer, I’ve been astonished all along at these companies’ gall. Having worked now for two smallish companies, and set up their legal policies and procedures, I’ll tell you straight off that it is very clear that federal laws as well as many state laws order telecommunications companies to scrutinize all subpoenas for phone records, wiretap requests, and the like, to ensure that they meet certain legal requirements.

I wrote and trained people on procedures to require this scrutiny, and we carefully followed the procedures. No one wants to get stuck in an enforcement action; those are messy, embarrassing and expensive – the goal is to follow the laws. At the one company where we actually got any significant number of these requests, when law enforcement failed to meet any of the legal requirements, we called the FBI or DOJ or whoever else, and told them they needed to jump through X or Y additional hoop, get a judge’s signature for the emergency order or what have you, and fax us the revised or additional doc before we could implement their request. And they did so. DOJ and the FBI were always very respectful of our requests.

I worked at **that **company prior to passage of the so-called-Patriot Act. Our **current **company apparently is in areas with little of interest; we get very few law enforcement requests. So I don’t know if Homeland Security is exceedingly pushy in some way.

I think it is highly likely that companies of AT&T’s size, which have hundreds of very good lawyers, devote ALL the time of some of those lawyers to law enforcement requests. There are numerous laws and regulations carriers must follow, and this is a highly regulated industry; lawyers are necessary and kept busy. There’s no way the large carriers’ attorneys would not be familiar with these wiretap laws and rules, which are in fact frequently referenced by the Federal Communications Commission, carriers’ primary regulator on the federal level. We have ethical obligations, and as in-house counsel, one of those is to try to keep our client (the telecommunications company) compliant with the law. If you violate one of these legal ethics “canons,” and it is discovered, you can lose your license to practice law, so solid lawyers strive to comply with the canons.

I therefore view it as likely that those carriers’ lawyers were on the ball and gave the right advice but it was overruled by the very top business-people as a result of political pressure or beliefs of those CEOs, or on Boards of Directors members – political pressure possibly even exerted by the President or Vice President, when you consider how important these wiretapping initiatives have been to them.

By the way, I don’t know about Qualcomm (referenced by OP) - that’s mostly an equipment manufacturer, to my knowledge (I seem to recall, they make CDMA chipsets and had some key patents?) - but QWEST, I know, did refuse to follow the herd; Qwest refused the Homeland Security requests, and it is believed by some that that is why they (and I’ve heard it’s ONLY Qwest, out of all the ILECs) then lost large federal government contracts, among other alleged retaliatory actions.

30

Thank you for your insightful post; I think it is extremely likely the in-house lawyers were ignored. I’m not quite sold on the “political pressure” angle; I think this is more a case of glad-handed good-ole-boys cutting corners as usual in this “accountability” administration (“Hey Ed, canya help us out here, ol’ buddy?” “Sure thing George; don’t worry about it.”), but that is splitting hairs.

Sorry, I probably should have said “Qwest” here; I work for a company that subcontracts with Qualcomm, so I think this was a Freudian slip :slight_smile: