We know how the telecoms were involved with the surveillance by the government. Well, last Thursday the Senate advanced legislation to give telecoms immunity for helping the government in these illegal activities… immunity not just for future involvement, but for their past involvement as well. This is nothing but bad. Thankfully, the mainstream media is giving their two cents worth. Here’s some excerpts of the excerpts:

[Telecom immunity] is not primarily about protecting patriotic businessmen, as Mr. Bush claims. It’s about ensuring that Mr. Bush and his aides never have to go to court to explain how many laws they’ve broken. It is a collusion between lawmakers and the White House that means that no one is ever held accountable.

All those who deliberately broke the surveillance laws should be held to account. If not, we are simply inviting more privacy abuses in the future.

Just because he’s the president doesn’t mean he can do an end run on the Constitution, and ignorance and fear of political retribution isn’t an excuse for violating our rights.

And to make a bad situation worse, it was recently uncovered that these privacy invasions had begun well before Sept 11th, which was the commonly held impetus for all of this:

Until a few days ago, it had been widely assumed that the Bush administration began its secret surveillance of citizens’ telephone calls and e-mails in the aftermath of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. That was bad enough, given that the law requires government agents to first obtain a court warrant before spying on communications. But new court papers indicate that the illegal spying might have been going on for months before 9/11.

Now it appears that 9/11 may well have been used to cover a program that was in place months in advance, when there was no good argument for warrantless surveillance.