House slices FISA bill
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/03/14/house.fisa.vote/index.html
Yesterday after the House of Representatives held its first secret session in 25 years, a majority voted to challenge President Bush's position on international wiretapping, a position that has been illegal under the current law since 9/11 but would have been made legal retroactively by a provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that has just been trimmed. This "retro-law" would have granted the participating telephone companies immunity from lawsuit over warrantless wiretapping.
Just off the top of my head, isn't it the President and his intelligence community who should be sued for making this decision and recruiting telephone companies to cooperate? It sounds like holding the companies responsible makes them a scapegoat for those who are immune from all laws. As far as the eternal question of anti-terrorism measures vs. privacy goes, the purpose of privacy is so our words and actions aren't used against us. If monitoring terror channels could be done in a way that guarantees this can't happen, it would be different. Perhaps a monitoring station with no recording, just a real-time watch for threats instead of datalogs and review. Or what if the calls were not monitored by a human being? But no, the intelligence agencies hired regular phone companies using their own tape-recorders.