Last ditch plans to derail FISA bill in US Senate

By Michael Fraase

Thursday, 26 June 2008 08:19PM CST

Section: Privacy

WiretapLast week the US House of Representatives voted to retroactively legalize warrantless wiretaps and grant immunity to US telecommunications corporations that cooperated with the program.

This week, Christopher Dodd (D-Connecticut) and Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin) are leading opposition to a companion bill working its way through the US Senate. Dodd successfully derailed a similar bill last December with a filibuster. On Tuesday he delivered an exceptionally well-reasoned speech from the Senate floor, promising another filibuster for this version of the legislation. Dodd cited allegations by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in his address:

“Clear, first-hand whistleblower documentary evidence [states] ... that for year on end every e-mail, every text message, and every phone call carried over the massive fiber-optic links of sixteen separate companies routed through AT&T’s Internet hub in San Francisco—hundreds of millions of private, domestic communications—have been ... copied in their entirety by AT&T and knowingly diverted wholesale by means of multiple ‘splitters’ into a secret room controlled exclusively by the NSA.”

Dodd goes on to cite Judge Vaughn Walker, the judge overseeing EFF’s lawsuit against AT&T, who wrote, “AT&T cannot seriously contend that a reasonable entity in its position could have believed that the alleged domestic dragnet was legal.”

The point is, according to Dodd, that the issue needs to be decided in a court of law, not the US Congress.

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