Silly Rabbit, Amnesty is for Corporations
As anticipated, the Senate passed FISA with telco immunity intact.
This is exceptionally frustrating for many reasons, most of which have already been aired throughout the blogosphere and old media. Sometimes you know you’re beat–despite the fact that the Senate is often considered the more liberal chamber of Congress and despite the fact that Democrats have a majority, the first attempt at removing immunity failed 32-66. With votes like that, the Democrats look beyond spineless.
A few interesting notes:
First, I see that McCain did not vote. (The only other Senator not voting was Ted Kennedy). One is left to wonder if he worried how his vote would affect his ability to gain support. Second, the conservative-leaning blogosphere appears to have been relatively quiet on this issue (except to express glee at divisions among Democrats over Obama’s stance on the bill). The bill, and telco immunity in particular, seems not to have as much (vocal) support among more or less regular people as the roll calls would indicate. This worries me as well (insofar as it can without much in the way of data to back it up).
The biggest thing, of course, is that certain telecommunications companies will go unpunished for doing something that was illegal. While I wish I had a more complete list of companies that did the right thing (I believe Qwest rejected the illegal requests) it’s pretty clear that Verizon and AT&T are both implicated and Google searches turn up suggestions that there were quite a few others. Among the more troubling aspects of this are indications that the NSA has worked with AT&T to monitor portions of the data backbone of the Internet, in which case they could conceivably see just about any communication you might place over the internet, regardless of who your ISP might be.
Regardless, there are still ways to punish AT&T, Verizon and others–simply refuse to purchase services from them.
