Annoying Priorities (politics again)

[jhetley]

Why the hell are all those congress-weasels squabbling over whether to grant immunity to telecoms that comply with illegal requests from the government?  Why not act to stop the illegal requests, and maybe to prosecute the flunkies who make them?  Or at least terminate their employment, perhaps with extreme prejudice?

Almost looks, to these aged and cynical eyes, as if certain elected bodies are more interested in bashing Verizon and ATT than in protecting the Constitution and their citizens...

Comments

[damiana-swan.livejournal.com]

To quote Heinlein at you, "anytime the question is 'why do they' the answer is 'money'." I would rephrase that to be "power" instead of "money", but you get the idea.

I agree that Congress should be going after the NSA for having made those requests, and whomever it was who directed the NSA to do so. But, as long US tradition recognizes, being given an illegal order does not excuse following it. The telecoms need to be prosecuted too. They have lawyers advising them; they knew darn well that what they were doing was not only illegal but also unconstitutional. Letting them off would be a very, very bad precedent.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Well, there's also a minor constitutional question of ex post facto law, immunizing illegal acts after they are committed.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

My guess is that the agents of the US government who entered into agreements with the Telecom companies signed some kind of legal documents that guaranteed immunity. The administration is desperate to prevent those documents from ever entering the public record, because while the documents will undoubtedly hold up in court the officers of the US government who signed them will be in deep doo-doo.