Alumni Report: Why the FISA Amendment Blows!

February 13, 2008 - 10:30 am By Rob - UPENN

fisa Cutting right to it, our privacy is the issue…or rather, it was the issue.

The Senate voted 69-29-2 to let the Telecom companies off the hook for their role in revealing private consumer information to the intelligence community (Hillary pussed out and didn’t vote). Everyone knew at the time that this went against the Constitution, but there was an unwritten agreement that there would never be prosecution. To make sure of that, a FISA amendment was passed.

FISA stands for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, but here is the bitch – it doesn’t make provisions for wide-scale domestic surveillance. This was the act that was used to get wire-tapping authority, even though it had no domestic precedent. It was like declaring war against another country because of something you heard on the street in the US…ok…bad example.

Boring legal sh*t aside, the problem is that this extends far and way beyond terrorism and CIA wiretaps. According to the working of the law, any governmental “search party” – maybe even for the music industry or a new governmental quest against file-sharing, according to this act – can request your identification from the Telecom companies and you’ll be “forcibly inclined” to cooperate.

I am all about keeping the terrorists from winning, but we are getting a little crazy now. I am, and have always been politically conservative – trust me, when you all graduate and start making your own money, your political views begin to shift – but this new provision not only protects the carriers from the privacy violations they have ever or will ever commit, it also opens up the range of information the government can gain access to. THAT is not cool, and goes against the very rights to privacy the founders of this country were trying to protect.

Everyone is pissed for 2 reasons:

1. We now live in a real fully monitored society.

2. The telecoms now have absolute immunity from lawsuits arising from trampling our right to privacy.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not a huge fan of the French, but those cheese-eating-surrender-monkeys might be onto something. For the longest time, we enjoyed more privacy than Europeans. The frogs put in many laws that hold companies accountable for caving into political pressures that are not backed by legal precedent.

Good work Frenchie – I still don’t like you!

Mac G says:

February 13, 2008 at 11:02 am

Great Post about the current police state that we live in. QWest actually did not give their phone records over to the govt without a warrant because it violated the law. Qwest was later shut out of a big govt contract and their CEO was indicted on a different charge by the Feds.

The telecoms that did comply with the government were interested in protecting their lucrative government contracts, not being some great Patriots that some politicians have argued. Example, the govt stopped paying their phone bill and telecoms cut them off, surely not the behavior of “almighty patriots” looking to protect us from terrorists.

I wish American citizens could break the law because one branch of our government tells us it is all right and then the other branch sanctions are law breaking later by retroactively changing the law.

Bottom Line: The telecom lobby lined enough pockets of Senators with campaign money and they won.

We now live in a society where the onus is on Americans to prove to our government that we are acting legal and not on the government to prove that we are acting illegal.

Sounds like Russia?

Rob says:

February 13, 2008 at 1:10 pm

EXACTLY – and the sad part is that somehow they got a warrant for QWest to submit, with absolutely no legal foothold, they scared the company with threat that they would announce that QWest was “protecting terrorist activities.”