From the Chicago Tribune's Voice of the People:

Harvey Grossman, Legal director, American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois
October 22, 2007

It is troubling that the Tribune endorses the notion of Congress "folding" to overt pressure from the White House to pass legislation authorizing massive surveillance of electronic communications by government without a warrant ("Spying and Congress," Editorial, Oct. 17).

After all, a fundamental tenet of our constitutional system is that each co-equal branch of government must be active in weighing the impact of legislation on the rights of the American people.

The Tribune continues, suggesting that members of Congress who now question the powers granted to the president in August as overly broad and insufficiently checked by the Congress or the courts are simply engaged in "rhetoric for political gain."

Such charges ignore repeated violations of the law by the Bush administration (in the use of national security letters, for example) and misguided views on the power of the presidency advanced by the White House and Department of Justice.

One element of the legislation under debate is a proposal to provide retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated with the government by granting broad access to the records and content of Americans' telephone calls after Sept. 11, 2001. The Tribune endorses this broad immunity, suggesting that these telecommunications companies simply were acting in a "patriotic" fashion.

Government regulation of this industry has an important impact on the bottom line earnings of these companies. Also a significant source of direct revenue for today's giant telecommunications companies is the federal government.

In order to influence regulation and legislation, and obtain profitable contracts from government agencies, telecommunications companies donate massive amounts of money to political campaigns in each election cycle and spend millions of dollars on high-priced lobbyists. These contributions are intended to nurture the relationship between the companies and government officials, relationships which benefit both the companies and the politicians alike. In these circumstances, it is as likely that the companies were coerced into cooperation rather than acting out of patriotism.

In the lawsuit challenging the telecommunications companies' disclosures to the National Security Agency, AT&T's own documents show an NSA-controlled room in San Francisco where millions of e-mail messages to and from ordinary persons are being indiscriminately copied for the NSA. AT&T relinquished complete control over the privacy rights of its customers to the government, resulting in a massive data-mining program of the private information of innocent Americans.

(I am co-lead counsel of the plaintiffs' executive committee in litigation pending against the telephone companies in federal court in San Francisco.)

In short, at present we do not know what motivated the telephone companies to work so collaboratively with the government or the damage done to the privacy of millions of Americans. Surely, in a system built on "checks and balances," the courts should be allowed to scrutinize the conduct of private companies that seem more clearly than ever to have violated our rights. That is the issue at stake in this discussion.

Online: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/letters/chi-1022ledeletteroct22,0,4809741.story.