New Rules on Wiretapping
After months of wrangling, Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress struck a deal on Thursday to overhaul the rules on the government’s wiretapping powers and provide what amounts to legal immunity to the phone companies that took part in President Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping program after the Sept. 11 attacks.
The deal, expanding the government’s powers in some key respects, would allow intelligence officials to use broad warrants to eavesdrop on foreign targets and conduct emergency wiretaps without court orders on American targets for a week if it is determined important national security information would be lost otherwise. If approved, as appears likely, it would be the most significant revision of surveillance law in 30 years.
This seems like a pretty good compromise to me. First off, while I know many people passionately disagree, I never felt that telecommunications companies should be held liable for cooperating in good faith with the government. If there was illegal activity in the gathering of this information, then it is the government that asked the phone companies to cooperate, rather then the phone companies that we should go after.
There has been a whole lot of back and forth over what is needed and not needed, what is reasonable and not reasonable as far as standards and time frames and what not. I don’t think that there is a definitive answer to these questions, it is a case of trade offs and balance, not right and wrong, and from a cursory view of this new law, it seems like a reasonable compromise to me.
