At issue in the high-stakes showdown — set to begin at 10:00 a.m. PST — are the nearly four dozen lawsuits filed by civil liberties groups and class action attorneys against AT&T, Verizon, MCI, Sprint and other carriers who allegedly cooperated with the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program in the years following the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The lawsuits claim the cooperation violated federal wiretapping laws and the Constitution.
In July, as part of a wider domestic spying bill, Congress voted to kill the lawsuits and grant retroactive amnesty to any phone companies that helped with the surveillance; President-elect Barack Obama was among those who voted for the law in the Senate. On Tuesday, lawyers with the Electronic Frontier Foundation are set to urge the federal judge overseeing those lawsuits to reject immunity as unconstitutional. At stake, they say, is the very principle of the rule of law in America.
'I think it does set a very frightening precedent that it's okay for people to break the law because they can just have Congress bail them out later,' says EFF legal director Cindy Cohn. 'It's very troubling.'"
The facts are clear: The hyena cabal ordered telecoms to eavesdrop and share transmitted voice and data information to the government. The effort went beyond "the war of terrorism" to spy on citizens. That is a violation of law. To claim "government secrets may be exposed" now is not enough, for the law protects those secrets only when the citizens' rights are also protected. The citizens were victimized, ergo, the hell with "secrecy" now.
For another, the murderous moron and the hyena cabal claim no crime, no violation of law, was committed. So why not argue that point, you fascists? Why not argue that you followed the letter and spirit of the law, which is what one argues when no crime has been committed? Why have you always taken the stance that telecoms need immunity or amnesty if nothing illegal happened?
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