Legalizing the Illegal While Covering the Telecoms

I still can’t get over that the dems all caved to Bush on the spying bill. I thought they had gotten it into their heads that they were sent to Washington to oppose things like this. And now, as Bush signs this horrible Orwellian law, he admits to us that this now makes legal what he was doing illegally.

President Bush signed into law on Sunday legislation that broadly expanded the government’s authority to eavesdrop on the international telephone calls and e-mail messages of American citizens without warrants.

Congressional aides and others familiar with the details of the law said that its impact went far beyond the small fixes that administration officials had said were needed to gather information about foreign terrorists. They said seemingly subtle changes in legislative language would sharply alter the legal limits on the government’s ability to monitor millions of phone calls and e-mail messages going in and out of the United States.

They also said that the new law for the first time provided a legal framework for much of the surveillance without warrants that was being conducted in secret by the National Security Agency and outside the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law that is supposed to regulate the way the government can listen to the private communications of American citizens.

“This more or less legalizes the N.S.A. program,” said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington, who has studied the new legislation.

Not that no one realized this this was already going on, but because he said jump, the dems were not supposed to say “how fucking high?”

Now, there is one other part of this NY Times article that I think this is pretty significant, if we remember the outrage and the ensuing lawsuits after the NSA program was revealed.  Telecoms were being held accountable by their customers, for handing over information to the government, without a warrant.

In January, the administration placed the N.S.A.’s warrantless wiretapping program under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and subjected it for the first time to the scrutiny of the FISA court.

Democratic Congressional aides said Sunday that they believed that pressure from major telecommunications companies on the White House was a major factor in persuading the Bush administration to do that. Those companies were facing major lawsuits for having secretly cooperated with the warrantless wiretapping program, and now wanted greater legal protections before cooperating further.

Not only did congress give Bush a blank check to watch over any of us, they gave the telecoms a fuzzy little blanket to keep their asses covered.

God damn corporate whores.