Telecom Immunity, The Next Round

By: Evan M
Published On: 11/16/2007 5:20:20 PM

The forces of accountability and public transparency have won one round in the battle to hold companies to account if they knowingly and willingly violate our civil rights. Yesterday, a Senate committee narrowly passed revisions to the FISA bill under consideration that deny telecommunications companies immunity from prosecution for their acquiescence to domestic eavesdropping without a warrant.
Reflecting the deep divisions within Congress over granting legal immunity to telephone companies for cooperating with the Bush administration's program of wiretapping without warrants, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a new domestic surveillance law on Thursday that sidestepped the issue.

By a 10 to 9 vote, the committee approved an overhaul of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that dropped a key provision for immunity for telecommunications companies that another committee had already approved. The Senate leadership will have to decide how to deal with the immunity question on the Senate floor. - The New York Times


Now the issue moves to the floor for consideration by the entire Senate. That means that every Senator's vote will count, and stopping immunity from moving forward will only take a "filibuster-minority" of 41 Senators. A bill without immunity became much more likely with this vote because the House had already voted to deny immunity to telecom companies earlier this week.

This outcome, one tactical victory in a much larger battle to take back our rights from The Executive, was achieved in no small part because people like you and me spoke out. Now that the Judiciary Committee has voted against immunity (even as the Intelligence committee voted for it), it falls to Majority Leader Reid to decide which version of the bill will be considered by the full Senate. And that's where things get interesting.

Sen. Reid hails from Nevada, one of the early primary states this year and a state whose importance in national politics has grown dramatically in the past two years. (Witness, for example, last night's debate.) That makes the question of "which bill" a Presidential primary question. The voters in Nevada have an opportunity to not only lobby their own Senator, Harry Reid, to place the bill without telecom immunity on the floor of the Senate, but they also can (and should) lobby Senators Clinton, Dodd, Obama and Biden to ask Sen. Reid to move the non-immunity bill forward. If Nevada cares, then these Senators care.

Similarly, we all have an opportunity to lobby our Senators, and the Presidential candidates on this issue. The bill will be considered next by the full Senate, which means each of our Senators has a voice. We need to use our own voices to make sure that accountability is returned to our society.

Never doubt the power of your voice. The men and women we elect serve at the pleasure of the American people. We are both their customers and their employers, and it is their sworn duty to uphold the Constitution which forges us into a polity. Corporate collusion with executive-branch coercion strikes at the heart of our Constitution - and that venerable document needs citizens like us to stand up and say "no more."

Call our Senators, tell them to ask Sen. Reid to advance the FISA bill without telecom immunity to the floor.

(Crossposted from Leesburg Tomorrow)

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