The main talking point that, in particular, Dianne Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi have used to claim the necessity of the FISA capitulation is that under this law, the FISA Court will be the "exclusive means" for electronic surveillance. The bamboozlement here is that FISA, a federal statute, never was the exclusive means before. Now we have confirmation of this, from a federal judge in California no less.
A federal judge in California said Wednesday that the wiretapping law established by Congress was the "exclusive" means for the president to eavesdrop on Americans, and he rejected the government's claim that the president's constitutional authority as commander in chief trumped that law.
The judge, Vaughn R. Walker, the chief judge for the Northern District of California, made his findings in a ruling on a lawsuit brought by an Oregon charity. The group says it has evidence of an illegal wiretap used against it by the National Security Agency under the secret surveillance program established by President Bush after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 [...]
But Judge Walker, who was appointed to the bench by former President George Bush, rejected those central claims in his 56-page ruling. He said the rules for surveillance were clearly established by Congress in 1978 under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires the government to get a warrant from a secret court.
"Congress appears clearly to have intended to - and did - establish the exclusive means for foreign intelligence activities to be conducted," the judge wrote. "Whatever power the executive may otherwise have had in this regard, FISA limits the power of the executive branch to conduct such activities and it limits the executive branch's authority to assert the state secrets privilege in response to challenges to the legality of its foreign intelligence surveillance activities."
Idiots, idiots, idiots. In the course of giving away massive new surveillance powers and immunity for lawbreakers, the so-called "chip" that they received in return was already in the law to begin with. Remember that exclusivity was DiFi's amendment, and Pelosi said it was "the most important" aspect of any new law.
(By the way, this lawsuit is against the federal government, not the telecoms, so it would continue regardless of the outcome of Tuesday's vote.)
Here is the text of my latest letter to Senator Feinstein on FISA and telecom immunity. It appears that we have been corresponding for so long that I now have a pretty good record to go by to understand her position. To see where she was, and where she's gone on this issue is not pretty.
Please note that I did take one last thing out of this letter before I faxed it, but I left it in for the readers here to understand just how I feel.
June 29, 2008
Senator Diane Feinstein
United States Senate
331 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510 Via Facsimile (202) 228-3954
Re: FISA Telecom Immunity
Dear Senator Feinstein:
For over two years, I have been writing to you about my outrage over the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping of American citizens. You have somehow found it possible, given your busy schedule selling out our civil rights, to respond to my communications from time to time, and I thank you for it. I would like to both review your positions on the issue, and respond to them, now that the Senate is considering a bill that would give the telecommunications companies that colluded with the administration immunity for their undisputed wrongdoing.
I first wrote to you about my concerns in early 2006. On April 12, 2006, you responded via email as follows:
I have carefully reviewed the Constitution and the laws relating to this domestic intelligence activity, along with the President's statements and those of the Attorney General and other Administration officials. I believe that the electronic surveillance program was not conducted in accordance with U.S. law. The program, as described, violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires a court order for surveillance of Americans.
Congress has updated FISA many times since 9/11 in order to provide our nation with all the necessary tools to fight terrorism. The Administration has never asked for the authority to conduct this program.
I believe the Administration also violated the National Security Act, which requires all members of the Intelligence Committee to be fully and currently informed of all significant intelligence activities other than covert actions. I am a member of the Intelligence Committee, and yet I was not told about this program until it was made public.
On October 20, 2007, I again wrote to you, via facsimile, when it became clear that you had backed away from your original position, as set forth above, because you were "undecided" as to whether to grant immunity to those telecommunications companies that had done what the administration wanted, in spite of the manifest illegality of doing so. I laid out a timeline of what I considered relevant events concerning warrantless wiretapping. I believe that timeline is as trenchant now as it was then, and I will again impart it to you:
1) On October 13, 2007, The Washington Post reported that based on documents released from the trial of Joseph Nacchio, former CEO of Qwest Communications, that the government had enlisted the telecommunications companies' assistance with its warrantless wiretapping program (the program) on February 27, 2001, fully six months prior to the attack on the World Trade Center (9/11);
2) While Quest refused, maintaining the program was illegal, other companies did participate;
3) At least one telecommunications company, Verizon, not only participated, but also demanded and received payment of $1,000 each time it provided information pursuant to the program;
4) Verizon was paid for its participation over 700 times;
5) The program, and telecommunications companies' illegal acts in support of it, failed to prevent 9/11;
6) According to fully corroborated testimony by James Comey before the Senate Judiciary Committee (upon which you sit), on March 11, 2004, although it had previously done so, the Department of Justice (DOJ) refused to affirm the legality of the program, but the President allowed the program to continue, despite DOJ's refusal;
7) The President, on April 20, 2004, publicly denied such warrantless wiretapping was taking place;
8) In December 2005, the existence of the program was disclosed by The New York Times;
9) In response to the disclosure, the President admitted to the existence of the program, but claimed that it (a) began after 9/11, and (b) prevented an attack on the Library Tower in Los Angeles (which the President called the "Liberty Tower");
10) Subsequent investigation revealed there was probably no imminent or even credible threat to the Library Tower;
11) In the ensuing months and years, the Administration has claimed that such warrantless wiretapping has been conducted very rarely, and only in extreme circumstances;
12) Subsequent investigation by the FBI's Inspector General revealed that such a claim is patently false; the FBI has abused its ability to issue National Security Letters and obtain private communications without warrants on hundreds of occasions, and many if not most of those letters were issued in connection with investigations wholly unrelated to terrorism;
13) On August 3, 2007, 60 Senators, including you, voted for the Protect America Act (PAA), which gives the Administration increased ability to engage in warrantless wiretapping;
14) After the PAA became law, several members of Congress indicated the Administration had warned them of an imminent threat of a terrorist attack upon Congress, which bore upon their votes;
15) Subsequent investigation reveals there was no such imminent threat;
16) In the ensuing weeks since the passage of the PAA, the President has claimed that the members of the "Gang of Eight" in Congress had been fully briefed on the warrantless wiretapping program;
17) At least three members of the "Gang of Eight" have indicated that they were not so briefed;
18) The President continues to claim that the warrantless wiretapping program was undertaken in response to 9/11.
Your response from January 22, 2008, via email, was remarkable, not only for the time it took to reach me (a mere six months), but for the amazing turnaround in your position on the matter:
I introduced an amendment on the Senate floor that would limit this grant of immunity. Under my amendment, cases against the telecommunications companies would go to the FISA Court for judicial review. The Court would only provide immunity if it finds that the alleged assistance was not provided, that assistance met legal requirements, or that a company had a good faith, reasonable belief that assistance was legal.
I believe that this approach strikes the correct balance: it maintains court review and a judicial determination of whether companies provided assistance that they should have known violated the law.
I have also filed an amendment to restore FISA's exclusivity, to ensure that no surveillance program can proceed outside the law in the way that the Terrorist Surveillance Program did for more than five years.
After reading your response, I responded the next day, with a facsimile that repeated the timeline, and included an additional point:
19) On January 10, 2008, it became publicly known that telecommunications companies had cut off FBI wiretaps because the bills had not been paid quickly enough to suit the companies.
I then received a letter via U.S. Mail that appeared to me to be a word-for-word repeat of your email. I am unsure whether you responded to my second facsimile at all, but suffice it to say that I was then clear about your position: you favored your judicial review that would grant immunity to telecommunications companies for a "good faith" belief in the legality something that they knew was illegal for over 30 years.
And so now the Senate is on the verge of voting on a bill that would go so much further than your pathetic "balanced" approach, in that the question of illegality of the wiretapping would never enter into the judicial review at all; rather, the review would be limited to deciding whether the companies were told they would somehow be protected by the Administration for breaking the law, and if they were, they become immune.
One has to wonder how we could have fallen so far into this Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole where "they told me I could" becomes the justification for excusing unlawful conduct. I think it is rather clear than when an important decision maker in the process moves from "I believe that the electronic surveillance program was not conducted in accordance with U.S. law" to "I introduced an amendment on the Senate floor that would limit this grant of immunity" that the responsibility lies, to a significant degree, with that decision maker, namely you.
From a negotiation standpoint, what you did makes no sense at all. Your amendment was a virtual capitulation from the beginning of the process that already gave the Administration more than it should have ever expected. There is no precedent in American law that would give intentional actors retroactive civil immunity for their acts, until you made such a notion possible. So, when Representative Hoyer began the negotiations that led to this bill, his side had already conceded a point that should not have been part of the calculus at all.
Further, I see no reason at all why the right of the American people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, was ever a negotiable point in the first place. That such a notion would have occurred to you makes me doubt your commitment to the Constitution and the People of the State of California, whom, I would like to remind you, you were elected to serve. We value our personal rights, as set forth in the very first provision of our State's constitution:
All people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable rights. Among these are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining safety, happiness, and privacy.
Finally, any notion that these companies acted in anything that would approach "good faith" is completely undermined by their eagerness to shut off the wiretaps for slow payment (and there has never been any suggestion that the government would not pay eventually) even if these taps were of great importance to ongoing investigations. The companies were not concerned with any notions of patriotism; they were only in it for the money. For you or anyone to maintain that telecom immunity must be passed in order to keep us from "being attacked by terrorists," is simply an insult. As I noted above, the illegal program was instituted before September 11, 2001, and it did not protect us then. This was an illegal, ineffective program that has produced nothing good in the short term, and promises to produce nothing but bad for our civil liberties in the long term.
Fortunately for the People of California, we have at least one Senator who still respects us, the things that make us strong, and our Constitution. She and a dedicated group of her colleagues have managed to put the brakes on what has felt like a runaway train that would destroy our civil liberties. With what now seems like the luxury of time (a scant two weeks), perhaps you can reflect upon the fiasco that that you would create by supporting the FISA bill, and finally come to understand that it does no good and much harm.
Moreover, even if you were to decide that ultimately this compromise is somehow the right thing to do, there is simply no need to do it hastily. We still do not know exactly what the telecommunications companies did, upon whom it was done, and we have no idea whether it produced anything at all that would make anyone safer. I feel that as to the last point, it did not, or else this Administration, which has little or no regard for the protection of state secrets, except when it feels such secrecy is politically advantageous, would have already disclosed it publicly.
I know that there is a political calculation going on here, but I would like to suggest to you that what appears to be the conventional wisdom on national security is no longer reflective of how the American people (and certainly the people of California) truly feel. We are not ready to cower at the first sign of a threat on our soil, and we are ready to respond not in fear, but with the strength born of our principles of justice and liberty.
There is no doubt that a significant cadre of politicians will try to make an issue out of the failure to pass this bad bill, but their efforts will not succeed as they may have if this were 2003. This Administration is the most unpopular in history, and the political difficulties that would inure to you and those on the side of liberty is not worth avoiding when compared to the massive unearned benefit the Administration and its supporters in Congress would gain from the bill's passage.
Finally, if this is indeed such an important decision to make, there is no reason why it cannot be made by the next Congress, and a new President. There is every reason to believe that the next President will be someone who understands and appreciates the U.S. Constitution, rather than referring to it as a "g*******d piece of paper," and I would much prefer that he make the final decision before signing any bill of this importance. Any investigation that is in place has not been, and will not be affected by not enacting the bill, and if there is a need to collect new information, the Administration can do what it always could have done: GET A WARRANT.
You should be grateful to Senators Boxer, Feingold, Dodd, and the others who have held back this dangerous juggernaut of a bill that would help only a privileged few and cause irreparable harm to this country, its people, and its reason for existence. They have given you what you, for no good reason, have declined to get for yourself: time to come to the right decision, and the only decision you can make with a good conscience (assuming you have one). NOTE: I omitted the italicized parenthetical from the final letter, as I decided it might be a little "over the top."
I urge you to take a cue from your constituents and act from strength and not from fear. Please oppose any FISA legislation that includes telecommunications company immunity, and please support the Constitution and an American system of justice that does not reward those who break the law.
I had the opportunity to speak with CA-04 candidate Charlie Brown about the awful FISA bill that wormed its way through the House on Friday. Unlike Steny Hoyer and practically everyone else in the House, Brown has actually gathered intelligence in his career. He served two rotations in Saudi Arabia, coordinating surveillance flights over the No Fly Zone in Iraq. So he has an understanding of how intelligence is collected and what ought to be done when such collection results in information gleaned from Americans.
As soon as I brought up the FISA bill, Brown sighed. He said there was no way he could support the bill that was passed in the House, and he in particular cited the telecom immunity aspect for a variety of reasons. "When I was gathering intelligence, if I ever picked up information outside what was authorized, I would have to flag the tape and immediately deliver it to my commanding officer for destruction," he said. "If I didn't, I'd be sitting at Leavenworth." To treat the phone companies in a different way that he would have been personally treated seems unfathomable. Brown's main argument is that the world is a dangerous place and foreign surveillance within the law is sometimes warranted. But the precedent of giving phone companies a free pass after the President supplies them with a piece of paper allowing them to break the law is quite dangerous. "This is exactly what happened in 1973. In the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident as a pretext to get us into that war, and the resolution passed was misused to escalate that conflict without the control of Congress. in 1973 Congress reasserted itself and passed the War Powers Act to ensure that never again could the executive go to war without expressed approval of the legislative body. And that was ignored for the next 35 years." Passing a FISA bill that is the "exclusive" means for electronic surveillance is part of the same deception. Laws don't need to be reasserted, they need to be enforced.
Brown was concerned that we seem to continue granting immunity to the wrong people, and not just the telecoms. We bail out Bear Stearns but not individual homeowners. We throw individual privates in jail for Abu Ghraib but never go up the chain of command. "There is an accountability problem in Washington, DC," as Brown put it. And the Title I aspects of the bill, which allow warrantless spying of bulk targets under executive-proclaimed "exigent circumstances," particularly with no need to throw out the intelligence gained that way if later found to to be illegal, was a concern as well.
If Charlie Brown can manage to run for office in what has traditionally been a heavily Republican district and understand that Constitutional principles and federal statutes must come first, then it's just impossible to take Bush Dogs who voted for FISA out of fear seriously. "Conservative Republicans should never vote for this kind of bill... they ought to be skeptical of government power and protective of civil liberties."
It's important that as we go forward we support those candidates who understand these issues, who will not be swayed by what a lobbyist or a leadership PAC will suggest, but who have the experience and strength to vote based on their own principles. There's no question in my mind that Charlie Brown is that kind of candidate.
We're seeing a real separation of those on the side of justice and those on the side of cover-ups in the FISA fallout. On the side of justice, for example, is Patrick Leahy:
But after months of negotiations, the House today unveiled a new FISA bill that I cannot support. While I applaud the fact that this legislation includes some of the important surveillance protections we wrote into the Senate Judiciary Committee bill last year, it fails to hold the Bush-Cheney Administration accountable for its illegal wiretapping program.
I will oppose this new FISA bill when the Senate votes on it next week. We must do everything we can to protect Americans from the Bush-Cheney Administration's erosion of our civil liberties and callous disregard for the rule of law -- and this new FISA bill fails that test.
Of course, he was cut out of the decision-making on this "deal."
Glenn Greenwald has it on good authority that my Representative, the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, is planning on letting the Republicans pwn the Constitution: (h/t FDL)
As has been expected for a week now, the House Democratic leadership has prepared and is now currently circulating (while trying very hard to keep it confidential) their so-called "compromise" FISA bill. Their soon-to-be-unveiled bill, unsurprisingly, is designed to give the White House exactly what it has demanded, with only the smallest and most inconsequential changes.
As I said to DiFi earlier this morning, not cool at all. The Democrats, save Chris Dodd and Russ Feingold, have been remarkably mute on this issue. It is an issue of basic seperation of powers and how much authority the President and his/her administration has. So, here's the president playing the fear card (via tortdeform)---> (flip it for more)
UPDATE (by Dave): TPM Muckraker has more and the details are quite different from what Greenwald reported. The compromise bill does not have immunity but there's still a possibility that they'll ping-pong the bill back and forth from the House to the Senate to get it back in. I'd have to look further, but the compromise bill does look to me to be "in the ballpark" of the RESTORE Act, which was a good bill. We're not out of the woods on this and all your reps. deserve a call. But it's not clear to me that this is a bad development... yet.
After voting against stripping telecom amnesty from the bill, and seeing her amendments fail, Sen. Feinstein voted against the final bill. Here's her statement:
"I have decided to vote against the FISA Bill before the Senate. This is not an easy decision because I strongly believe that we need to modernize the law relating to the gathering of foreign intelligence, and I support many of the provisions in the Senate bill.
However, I believe this bill didn't do enough to protect against the assertion of executive power. I have said on many occasions that without the additional language to strengthen and tighten the exclusivity already in FISA, I could not support final passage.
I offered an amendment on this very issue. My amendment, which would have made it clear that FISA is the excusive authority for wiretapping U.S. persons for foreign intelligence purposes, received well more than a majority of this body - 57 votes. But it did not receive the 60 votes required. Given this strong vote, I remain hopeful that similar language will be included in a FISA bill that goes to the President.
There should never be another warrantless surveillance program. And I continue to believe that there should be a strong statement in law making it crystal clear that FISA must be followed, period.
Unfortunately, the bill before the Senate did not include such language and simply didn't go far enough in protecting against executive power. That's why I voted against the Senate bill."
This elides the immunity issue and foregrounds the exclusivity amendment. But take it for what it's worth.
There are now 54 other Congresscritters to focus on as the FISA bill head into a House-Senate conference. The House's RESTORE Act is actually a fairly decent, though imperfect, bill. FDL has a petition you can sign to demand that it becomes the basis for what is sent to the President. Call your representative and reaffirm that.
UPDATE: From the comments, seems like Feinstein pulled a Lieberman here, voting for cloture, against the final bill, and releasing a statement about the latter and not the former. This, of course, makes me a chickensh*t. And Art Torres a bold truth-teller. And Dianne a patron saint.
As the FISA debate unfolds today one of California's senators finds herself at its center. Dianne Feinstein has offered two amendments to the odious Senate Intelligence Committee bill, one of which would have the FISA court itself determine whether telecoms are eligible for immunity. Over at the Courage Campaign I have explained why her approach is so deeply flawed.
It's bad enough that she wants a secret court, which average Americans like you and I don't have the right to access, to determine whether our basic legal rights and privacy protections are valid. What's worse is the underlying reasoning she is using. Feinstein believes that all the telecoms and the Bush administration have to show the FISA court would be that they acted in "good faith" - and voila, the telecoms are immune.
As the senator herself has explained, Feinstein's amendment would kick the whole issue of telecom immunity to the FISA court. In her press release, she details her immunity amendment more clearly. It would lay out a series of three tests that the FISA court would use to determine whether immunity should be granted. Quoting from her explanation of the second test:
The FISA Court would examine whether companies that provided assistance to the government without a certification did so in good faith and pursuant to an objectively reasonable belief that its compliance was legal.
(We've discussed Sen. Feinstein's relationship with telco immunity quite a bit here, so here's one more. - promoted by Brian Leubitz)
If you're like me, you were upset about the thought that the Congress would give telecom companies immunity for participating in a warrantless wiretapping program set up by the Bush Administration. If you're from California like me, you were upset that your Senator, Diane Feinstein, would actually have considered supporting such a horrendous idea. And, if you're like me, you contacted Senator Feinstein about it.
It seems like it was a long time ago that I wrote to Senator Feinstein, and I frankly expected that she would blow off all of us. But tonight, I received a response from her via email.
(This is cross-posted at Daily Kos. People there suggested I post here. That was a great idea. I should come here more often.)
Dodd was just on C-SPAN saying that the Senate is moving on to other issues beyond the FISA bill. He just yielded the floor. He said he was prepared to spend his full 30 hours speaking on the bill but "that will no longer be necessary." Sen. Reid just pulled the bill until January.
Reid was taking a lot of heat for this, and in the end perhaps felt that he couldn't hold out any longer. I'm guessing that he'll push for allowing the full Senate to view those legal opinions on warrantless wiretapping as a condition for moving forward on the bill.
This is one of the first good days in a long time, but keep in mind that Reid may have simply reasoned that he wouldn't have had time to finish all the other crap legislation he has coming down the pike, including giving a no-strings $70 billion in war funding to Bush. Keep in mind that there are some good shifting of budget priorities in that omnibus bill, including slashing abstinence-only education funding, raising the Consumer Product Safety Commission budget by 28%, and saving a host of social services from the chopping block. But I guess Reid made the determination that funding Bush's war was more important than giving telecoms a free pass.
What have we learned? Filibusters are powerful tools because one Senator can make life a living hell. The progressive movement has enough allies and enough power to at least slow down this rush to a national surveillance state. And now Dianne Feinstein's cards are on the table. Let's be clear: she said to the full Senate today that she voted for telecom immunity in her various committees. This is 100% counter to Art Torres' contention that she helped "stop" immunity in the Judiciary Committee. And we saw her "split the baby" compromise to keep any determination of telecom immunity secret.
UPDATE: I should mention that this is just a round, not the whole battle. The bill will come back up in January, and there will be just as much pressure to immunize the telcos then. So keep calling those Senators and tell them that you believe in the rule of law.
I just listened to Dianne Feinstein's floor speech on the FISA bill being debated in the Senate today. As you may know, Sen. Reid ignored 230 years of Senate custom and Chris Dodd's hold to proceed on FISA legislation that included immunity for those telecom companies which illegally acted to help the government spy on Americans without a warrant. Reid pushed through the motion to proceed, which was agreed to on a 76-10 vote (Feinstein voted to proceed; Boxer voted against it). Sen. Dodd has vowed to hold a real-deal filibuster, taking the floor and refusing to yield except for questions. Sens. Feingold and Kennedy have agreed to help him on this, and Sen. Boxer has yielded some of her time to Sen. Dodd so that he can take the floor.
This filibuster has not begun. And so Sen. Feinstein took the floor. She offered two amendments to the bill and said she would have a hard time voting for the bill without the amendments' passage. The first amendment concerned "exclusivity." She's asking that the FISA court be the exclusive authority for gathering intelligence for electronic surveillance. That's fine. Her claim is that if the President's program was always under FISA , we wouldn't have any of the problems we have now, because there would be judicial review.
Next, she said "I voted for telecom immunity in the committee. I am not inclined to vote for it without this amendment." She's trying to say that immunity is actually not what it seems, and the companies are prevented from making their own defense, and that as long as they got a written statement from the Attorney General saying everything they did was OK, then we should let them off the hook. She's claiming that all of this happened after 9/11 when that's not true (and Sen. Kennedy just pointed that out). "This Administration, not the companies... made a flawed legal determination." Oh, these poor telecom officials. They apparently don't have a staff of lawyers. "The amendment I will submit would put before the FISA court whether the telecom companies should receive immunity before the law." She wants an en banc panel of the FISA court to make the determination. Once again, that would keep the entire case of domestic spying secret. This would preserve judicial review. Feinstein admits "I can't say whether (the telecoms) met the iummunity provisions or not." So she voted for immunity when she didn't know if the law allowed it. Great.
This is the key point. Feinstein's default position is to trust the President. As long as members of the executive branch write on a piece of paper that what the telecom companies did was legal, apparently all existing statutes should be waived. There is a supercomputer on Folsom Street in San Francisco that is sweeping up practically every communication that goes through AT&T's switcher. Given all of this, Feinstein's default is to immunize the telecoms. When she gets pushback, she decides that a secret court should make the determination beyond public view whether or not the telecoms are liable for illegal spying. A determination of this in public view is all that stands between this country and a surveillance state.
(also up at Daily Kos. full disclosure: I work for Courage)
Bradley Whitford, better known to many of you as Josh Lyman on The West Wing, took time out of filming a movie in Calgary to shoot this video for the Courage Campaign on the importance of opposing retroactive immunity for telecom companies. Go watch the video and then do as he says, call your Senators.
Telecom immunity is scheduled to be brought up this week, last I heard Thursday. It is extremely important that all of our Senators hear from us and hold the line against retroactive immunity.
Senator Dodd has promised to filibuster any bill that lets the phone companies off the hook for passing on our private information to the government without a warrant. But we need 41 votes to sustain the filibuster and we need your help to get us there.
202-224-3841 (Washington, DC)
310-914-7300 (Los Angeles)
415-393-0707 (San Francisco)
619-231-9712 (San Diego)
559-485-7430 (Fresno)
Courage Campaign teamed up with CREDO Action (from Working Assets) to send a message out to all of our California members today. (email after the jump)
You can draw your own conclusions from what went down this weekend in Anaheim. But I have to call attention to what is being put out there as a growing meme, that DiFi somehow worked with Chris Dodd to "kill" telecom immunity in the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. Nothing could be further from the truth, and anyone pushing this line is delivering blatant misinformation.
Sen. Feinstein voted AGAINST stripping immunity out of the Title II provisions of the bill. The eventual vote to report out a bill without immunity was simply a chance to buy time. As I noted the other day, James Risen's article in the New York Times nailed this:
Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who also opposed Mr. Feingold's measure, pleaded with Mr. Leahy to defer the immunity issue because she wants more time to consider several compromise proposals.
What happened in the Judiciary Committee was a punt. There's going to be a floor fight, and NOTHING is resolved. DiFi wants to sign on to a bipartisan centrist compromise that probably won't be a compromise at all. If and when she does so, we can assess her position on the merits; for now, we can continue to tell her how we feel on the issue (And I hope Chairman Torres along with anyone else concerned about granting legal amnesty to companies who break the law and violate our privacy will continue to do so). But suggesting that she "led the fight" to kill telecom immunity is an insult to my intelligence. How can you kill something that's not dead, and where the so-called leader is actually looking for ways to return it to the bill on the floor? Try that logic on somebody else.
(Incidentally, the way certain progressive organizations whooped and hollered and jumped in to take credit for DiFi's vote, which was nothing more than a vote to take pressure off of her, didn't help matters.)
