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.

Today the EFF confronted congress on the government’s surveillance of Americans and on the repercussions to those Americans’ privacy that could result. The government is collecting vast amounts of personal data and storing them in those oh so secure government databases:

We have all heard about security problems with government databases. A report from the Department of Homeland Security found 477 breaches in 2006 alone.

These databases are a black hat hacker’s dream come true. This is, of course, why OpenID is such a great idea. Sure it has its problems, but using OpenID means that login data doesn’t need to be distributed across the Internet at every website you visit. This decreases the black hats’ vector of attack tremendously. If I could have all of my login data being held at VeriSign, instead of having some of it at Yahoo, some at Tumblr, and some at Facebook… I’d be fine with that.

Anyway, while the distributed login data issue has a solution in sight, the government surveillance issue does not. The RESTORE Act will hopefully reinstate those checks and balances that were lost when the Protect America Act granted the telecoms immunity when helping the NSA spy on Americans. So I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Support the EFF!

Yesterday I talked about Microsoft’s stealthy updating and what that means to Windows user. This post in the same vein. This is about AT&T and the US government illegally wiretapping Americans. In 2005, it was reported that the NSA has been illegally intercepting communications since about 2001. Shortly after this story broke, the EFF filed a lawsuit against AT&T for these actions. AT&T claimed it was only doing what the gov’t told them to do, but the judge rejected it.

Here is an email I received from the EFF on the case:

At a packed San Francisco hearing today [August 15th], the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) defended your Fourth Amendment rights and urged the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to let our class-action lawsuit against AT&T go forward. The case demands that AT&T stop illegally assisting the National Security Agency to snoop on its customers’ telephone and Internet communications.

There’s much more at stake here than stopping the Bush Administration’s illegal spying and holding the telco giant accountable, though. The President is arguing that thin claims of “state secrets” can trump the courts’ constitutional duty to uphold the rule of law.

Without judicial review, there’s no way to protect ordinary citizens against government abuses of power. No president, now or in the future, should be allowed unfettered authority to evade the courts and trample on your freedom. As Judge Vaughn Walker wrote in rejecting the government’s claims at the lower court, “The compromise between liberty and security remains a difficult one. But dismissing this case at the outset would sacrifice liberty for no apparent enhancement of security.”

Privacy and freedom is definitely something we as Americans take for granted and think we’re entitled too. But if we sit idle too long, they might just disappear faster than we think. We need to fight for our freedoms. Call your senator or representative to stop the spying. Or at the very least, donate to EFF so they can fight for us.

Sure it might be cliché to mention it, but think 1984. A world where Big Brother is everywhere. How far are we really from that now?