<dave@farber.net> Subject: The secret lobbying campaign your phone company doesn't want you to know about [I hope everyone has written their Congressmen to not dare give immunity to these anti-freedom activities! -Rob] Case Dismissed? The secret lobbying campaign your phone company doesn't want you to know about By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball Newsweek Updated: 4:00 a.m. PT Sept 20, 2007 <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20884696/site/newsweek/> Sept. 20, 2007 - The nationbs biggest telecommunications companies, working closely with the White House, have mounted a secretive lobbying campaign to get Congress to quickly approve a measure wiping out all private lawsuits against them for assisting the U.S. intelligence communitybs warrantless surveillance programs. The campaignbwhich involves some of Washington's most prominent lobbying and law firmsbhas taken on new urgency in recent weeks because of fears that a U.S. appellate court in San Francisco is poised to rule that the lawsuits should be allowed to proceed. If that happens, the telecom companies say, they may be forced to terminate their cooperation with the U.S. intelligence communitybor risk potentially crippling damage awards for allegedly turning over personal information about their customers to the government without a judicial warrant. b Itbs not an exaggeration to say the U.S. intelligence community is in a near-panic about this,b said one communications industry lawyer familiar with the debate who asked not to be publicly identified because of the sensitivity surrounding the issue. But critics say the language proposed by the White Housebdrafted in close cooperation with the industry officialsbis so extraordinarily broad that it would provide retroactive immunity for all past telecom actions related to the surveillance program. Its practical effect, they argue, would be to shut down any independent judicial or state inquires into how the companies have assisted the government in eavesdropping on the telephone calls and e-mails of U.S. residents in the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks. b Itbs clear the goal is to kill our case," said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based privacy group that filed the main lawsuit against the telecoms after The New York Times first disclosed, in December 2005, that President Bush had approved a secret program to monitor the phone conversations of U.S. residents without first seeking judicial warrants. The White House subsequently confirmed that it had authorized the National Security Agency to conduct what it called a b terrorist surveillance programb aimed at communications between suspected terrorists overseas and individuals inside the United States. But the administration has also intervened, unsuccessfully so far, to try to block the lawsuit from proceeding and has consistently refused to discuss any details about the extent of the programbrebuffing repeated congressional requests for key legal memos about it. <snip> ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE