Dodd Leads On Telco Amnesty
Posted on Thu Nov 08, 2007 at 09:09:26 AM EST
Tags: (all tags)
Against the odds, Senator Chris Dodd has led the fight against FISA telco immunity.
The first step is to make sure retroactive immunity doesn't make it out of the Senate Judiciary Committee -- where it will be considered shortly.If we can get it stripped there, it will have to be offered as an amendment to the overall bill where it will be a lot easier to get 41 votes against retroactive immunity than 41 to sustain my filibuster if necessary
This is a vitally important issue, as the Dodd campaign demonstrates in this video of the whistleblower Marc Klein, who told the story of the telco's failure to respect the privacy of its customers that the law (the Communication Storage Act) requires.
My name is Mark Klein. I used to be an AT&T technician for 22 years.[Former AT&T Technician Mark Klein Speaks Out on Retroactive Immunity and Domestic Surveillance]
"What I figured out when I got there is that they were copying everything flowing across the internet cables, the major internet links between AT&T's network and other companies' networks."
"It struck me at the time that this was a massively unconstitutional, illegal operation."
"It affects not only AT&T's customers, but everybody because these links went to places link Sprint, Qwest, a whole bunch of other companies."
"And so they're basically tapping into the entire internet."
[But isn't the government only monitoring suspected terrorists and not ordinary Americans?]
"To perform what they say they want to do, which is look at international traffic, none of this makes any sense. These installations only make sense if they're doing a huge, massive domestic dragnet on everybody in the United States."
[Shouldn't the telecoms trust that the Bush administration's requests are legal?]
"These companies know very well what's legal and illegal. They've been dealing with this for decades. And it's a fact that Qwest refused the NSA's approaches because they didn't have, they weren't shown any legal justification for it. And they did the right thing and said, "no." "
"What I'm here for is it looked like a few weeks ago that the Senate bill which passed the Intelligence Committee would give immunity to the telecom companies and that would probably put an end to the lawsuits."
[The Senate Judiciary Committee is currently reviewing retroactive immunity]
"So I came here to lobby against giving immunity to the telecom companies. Let the court cases proceed and Congress should not interfere in that."
Call the Judiciary Committee Senators now. Use this. Chris Dodd will pay for your call.
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