Why the Telecoms Shouldn’t Get Immunity
You’d think anyone who remembered J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and Nixon’s CIA, the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 - let alone the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution - might be concerned about the government illegally snooping on Americans. But executives at the nation’s biggest telecoms — AT&T, Verizon, and others — didn’t blink an eye when the National Security Agency came knocking. You want records of domestic phone calls? Sure, help yourself! Emails? Yeah, we got tons. They’re yours!
When word of this leaked out and the companies got sued by Americans who didn’t particularly like the idea of government rummaging through everything they said or wrote, the telecoms went to Congress and complained it wasn’t their fault. They deserve immunity from such lawsuits, they argue. They were only following orders. Congress is about to decide whether their argument holds water. It doesn’t.
Only following orders? What if the government told telecoms to use their technologies to spy on American bedrooms, or turn over our bank accounts, or our photographs, home videos, anything else we store on computers or transmit through cables or over the Internet? The “only following orders” excuse would make telecoms extensions of our spy agencies.
Corporate executives have a duty to disobey government orders when they have reason to believe those orders are illegal or unconstitutional — and make the government go to court to get what it wants. The duty to refuse is especially important when it comes to the nation’s telecoms, whose technological reach is extending deeper and deeper into our private lives.
Sure, there’s a delicate balance between fighting terrorism and protecting civil liberties. But that’s for courts to decide - not spy agencies and not telecom executives. If in doubt, the telecoms can go to the special courts set up precisely to oversee this balance, and get a declaratory judgment. Yet the only way to keep pressure on them to do this and not become agents of our spy agencies is to continue to allow Americans to sue them for violating their legal rights.
Robert Reich is Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written ten books, including The Work of Nations, which has been translated into 22 languages; the best-sellers The Future of Success and Locked in the Cabinet, and his most recent book, Reason. His articles have appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. Mr. Reich is co-founding editor of The American Prospect magazine.
LESSONS LEARNED FROM BLACKWATER
Retroactive immunity is an advanced, premium version of ordinary prior immunity, the kind Blackwater had in Iraq.
The beauty of retroactive immunity for intended criminal acts is that it can apply to ANY act by ANY party ANYwhere. A court simply turns the clock back and mandates at that point in time, the act was legal instead of illegal.
Imagine the incentives to break laws everywhere created by such retroactive reversals of current law. A privatized Blackwater SWAT team busts your door down and kills a few people by accident.
“Well, your Honor, it’s true that Blackwater doesn’t have prior immunity in the U.S., but as its attorneys, we do ask for RETROACTIVE immunity since the government asked them to do it.”
After all, how can Blackwater maintain morale and incentive to do its job with only $1,500/day per operative? Knowing it can receive IMMUNITY at any time for PAST acts gives it the patriotic courage to charge forward and “get ‘er done” regardless of the collateral damage to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
You’re either WITH retroactive immunity or FOR the terrorists.
Ha! The only duty someone in the CEO’s seat is willing to recognize is the duty to make as much money as possible. Civic duty is a foreign language to a major corporate exec.
Hear!Hear!
Congress is a bunch of fools if they grant immunity to the telecom companies.
He’s right. They should pay and pay BIG. But, I find it hilarious that RR is the one crying foul. It’s his adminstration that cut all these deals in ‘96…and I’d bet the farm that, somewhere in the fine print, giving up records was part of the deal. Getting to make billions on all that bandwidth was enough to say anything. They also know that if they don’t cooperate, that precious bandwidth can be taken away at some future point.
So,
1. The telecoms make billions.
2.The feds automatically get a tracking device on every citizen who has one, and the means to hear & see everything you write or say through them. (And WE pay for the device. (Ha! Gotta love THAT!)
3. The MSM gets a treasuretrove of booty from the marketing and another venue to shuck and jive.
Gotta love it. (Oh, and RR of course has another book to sell.)
SBC bought over AT&T/Cingular during the Bush regime, not before. The FCC did relax the laws during the Clinton era, but Texas based firms most notorious delas came in the 2000s.
Even before Bush came to the white house, his cronies in Dallas and Austin were helping the Fat Asses from Southern Bell make hostile acquisitions of companies like Ameritech. We are now left with an Oligopoly, where as when the rules were more stringent, we honestly had choices.
And R(B?)R up here knew what was to come. Why can no influence be exerted on the Regime by the Democrats, if this is a democratic country? Are’nt the democrats weilding any clout with these companies?
Can they not bring to motion any legal action against what these companies did? It would seem like the Bush Regime is powerful enough to hand down fiscal and nepotistic sentences to the companies that do’nt comply, or are chummy enough with them to have such easy access to private records.
There US government has to take a stand and investigate exactly what happened and how it happened when the Regime illegally asked for private information.
Let the telecoms eat cake!!!
Just imagine, though, if the government had demanded proprietary software and hardware. The telecoms would have been screaming about infringement of property rights and protecting shareholder value. Customers just aren’t as important.
May I peek through the window of neighbor lady at night in case she’s engaged in terrorism, and get the legislature to grant me retroactive immunity? Oh, that’s right. This remedy is available only for the aristocracy. Sorry.
And while they’re at it, why not grant some retroactive immunity to Bernard Barker, E Howard Hunt, and G Gordon Liddy? They, too, were only cooperating with a White House request to bend the laws against warrantless domestic spying just a little bit.
Over the years, the taxpayers of this nation spent billions in the NSA black budget to develop, perfect, and deploy overseas some absolutely amazing, super classified hi tech surveillance devices that enabled our national security spooks to retrieve and record every bit of human conversation taking place inside a targeted foreign embassy, a military command center, or government meeting room. The whole essence of the Watergate scandal, and its supposed related legal reforms, was to insure that intrusive CIA/DIA/NSA surveillance techniques would be strictly limited to counter espionage use abroad, and never utilized on American soil for domestic purposes unless the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirements had first been satisfied.
According to at least one of the whistle blowers in the ATT case, NSA gained the telecoms’ cooperation, physically installed their data retrieval equipment, and set up shop scooping up wholly domestic US phone, FAX and email messages shortly after George W. Bush was inaugerated in January of 2001, MONTHS BEFORE 9/11. Of the corporations so approached by the federal executive branch, only Qwest Communications is known to have declined to cooperate.
Why isn’t the appropriate committee of the Democratic controlled House investigating how this brazen defiance of the FISA felony statute came about (months before the terrorist attacks) with an eye upon impeaching or criminally prosecuting the perps, rather than seriously contemplating a grant of immunity for the corporate and governmental wrongdoers?
As Deep Throat put it, follow the money.
Watch to see where the campaign donations flow from the telecom companies this election cycle, while the issue of retroactive immunity is up for legislative grabs.
Tricky Dick is out there chuckling in his grave. How soon they repress the memories of Watergate, just like they forget the lessons of Vietnam.
Bill from Saginaw
Its funny how profitable AT&T is today. What we have here is the Republican response to Jimmy Carter breaking up AT&T. It seems like 8 years ago they were not doing too well and now all I see is new equipment being installed. Must be the tools for the new “Patriot Act lite”. New spying tools on every block.
How much immunity do you think our neighors should give us if they catch us peeping into their young daughter’s bedroom window? Or if they found out we had regularly done this in the past? It’s rather foolish/presumptuous of telecoms to expect they should be treated any differently, don’t you think?
RE: B Payne-Economist November 28th, 2007 1:11 pm
I’m beginning to appreciate your sarcastic sense of humor, but I imagine if you speak like this with your friends you pretty constantly nurse a perpetual black eye LOL. It does make one have to carefully read what you are writing, though.
Somewhere along the line, the democratic leadership lost its spine because it was afraid to appear, well, er spineless.
They can compel testimony, but they won’t. They can issue supoenas and lock up violators in the basement of the capital, but they won’t. They can threaten impeachement, but Pelosi took that ‘off the table’, so they won’t. They could even hold impeachment hearings and censure votes but they won’t.
So I have a hard time bleieving they will listen to us and NOT grant immunity. So let’s see, amnesty for rich white guys - check. Legalization for poor brown people, uh, no.
This sure doesn’t feel like America any more.
Top Spy Must Release Telecom Immunity Meeting Docs ASAP
By Ryan Singel November 28, 2007 | 3:12:47 PM
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/11/top-spy-must-re.html?cid=91517560#comment-91517560
“You’re either WITH retroactive immunity or FOR the terrorists.”
Ha!
You’re either WITH the spies or FOR the terrorists.
Cash For Immunity!
Spy Nation!
Reich is right. Telecoms have a sacred trust, like banks, hospitals, and government agencies, to guard personal information. That’s in the law. People count on their privacy being protected by these companies in order to do business with them. Now, this trust is being jeopardized.
at&t Wireless .. “free youself.”
DREAMER TOO - that’s precious, and very funny turning their sloganized illusion of BRANDING, to have each of us be empowered to throw off the chains that bind us, including AT&T’s worthless disrespect for our rights.
I wonder how they internally hide their corporate shenanigans for the prying eyes, as I’m sure they must always be strategizing how to stay ahead, and of course their own lobbing onslaughts to DC and hidden agendas.
If we could only tap into their own technology to hide their evils from the snopping gov’t, then could we also not we free of the spys too?
Namaste
__ __ __ __ We must be the change
__ __ __ __ we wish to see in the world __ Gandhi
“The “only following orders” excuse would make telecoms extensions of our spy agencies. …Sure, there’s a delicate balance between fighting terrorism and protecting civil liberties. But that’s for courts to decide - not spy agencies and not telecom executives.”
Thank you, Robert Reich!
Let’s not forget that Congress named this Wiretap Access Bill the “Digital Telephone and Privacy Improvement Act”. It’s more like a “Privacy Invasion Act”!
I can’t remember if it was James Bamford’s book, but I remember reading somewhere that there was NO debate on this bill and that it was passed by “unanimous consent” vote which essentially absolves our fearless leaders of any responsibility connected with its passage. Hmmmmm….do you suppose they all new it may have been in violation of Constitutional Law?
By the way - all those addition taxes and fees we continue to see on our phone bills are probably paying for the purchase and installation of the technology needed by these companies to wiretap us.
The Constitution used to guarantee Americans immunity from being spied on by their own government, nspire.
“tap tap”
Who’s there?
“NSA”