It appears, once again, that Congress is looking to "compromise" with the Bush Administration on FISA reforms - a compromise that would, in fact, compromise our basic privacy, the rule of law and the Constitution. Yet again, seeking to snatch defeat from the jaws odf victory, some Democrats are looking for a way to hand telecom companies retroactive immunity for spying on their customers and breaking the law. According to Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU's Washington Legislative Office:

From the language we've seen, we're back at square one, looking at a bill just like the old Senate bill that lacks meaningful judicial involvement. The Fourth Amendment requires prior and individual court review before the government digs into our private conversations. It is clear the next vote will be on a bill that fails this test - by permitting the government to conduct mass untargeted surveillance, sometimes without prior court review, and sometimes with prior court review - and then only when the government unilaterally decides that it is willing and able to answer to the judicial branch.

It is also clear that the deal is intentionally designed to grant immunity to companies that facilitated illegal wiretapping. If the only role for the court - be it District or a FISA court - is to determine whether the companies received a request from the Administration, and not to determine whether those requests were legal, it's a sham review. The president has publicly acknowledged that the companies were repeatedly sent authorizations to turn over Americans phone calls and emails. It is absolutely guaranteed that current and future cases will never determine whether this administration and its friends in the telecom industry broke the law.

Take a minute, today, to call your Congressperson and remind them: No telecom immunity. No warrantless wiretapping. Period. The capitol hill switchboard is: (202)224-3121.

Glenn Greenwald writes:

Democrats are about to institutionalize a proposition that has been rejected since the Nuremberg Trials -- namely, that individuals (or, more accurately, lobbyist-protected corporations) are free to break the law as long as they can claim afterwards that they were told by the Leader to do so. That's the principle which the Democratic Party -- following their standard pattern of having enough of their members join a virtually unanimous GOP while the Democratic leadership enables it all -- is about to write into our laws.

The excuse Congressional Democrats are using for this behavior -- that passing a FISA/telecom bill is necessary to avoid political harm -- is as false as it is cowardly. As I noted the other day, there are all sorts of easy ways to avoid political controversy if that goal were really what was driving them, including simply extending the existing PAA orders by 6-9 months so that they don't expire in August.

You can read more about the proposal at the ACLU national site.