I’m tired of the Internet. I often think about how nice it was back in the glory days of the 1990s when I had to dial a phone number to check my email, which I only did once every few days. Now it’s all around me at all times, and it’s driving me nuts. I can’t get anything done. Sometimes I think our world would be a better place if one giant corporation controlled the Internet, because at least then there would be no websites worth visiting.

Well, there’s not much we can do now, but if anyone bothered to call their representatives and register their displeasure, I appreciate it. I know everyone’s suffering from scandal fatigue, but this one’s kind of a doozy:

Also, a lawyer in the al-Haramain case wrote a disturbing and bizarre story on Salon today about the difficulty of proving a charge when no one is allowed to see the proof. Al-Haramain, for those who haven’t been following, is an ongoing court battle between the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, alleged evil-doers, and the Bush Administration. The short story is that al-Haramain was accused of financing terrorist plots (in full disclosure, accused by many people), the Bush administration froze their assets, and al-Haramain sued. During the course of their lawsuit, a government employee accidentally gave logs of al-Haramain’s tapped phone conversations to al-Haramain’s lawyers.

These logs were immediately deemed confidential, and since then, al-Haramain’s lawyers have been fighting tooth and nail to use this proof as, well, proof. Let’s make this part perfectly clear: there is no question that the Bush administration broke the law. That’s not up for debate. And I don’t just say that as a flaming lefty — The New York Times reported on the illegal wiretapping and Bush admitted it. It’s what’s known in the legal profession as a “no-brainer.” The actual fight that’s happening right now is whether or not it’s okay that the President broke the law.

Anyway, so the al-Haramain lawyers saw the secret document but had to destroy it in the interest of national security. After that, they were allowed to object to the document on memory, so long as they also destroyed anything that assisted in their memory. In this section of the Salon article, their government liaison has brought in her IT person to help the author destroy a hard drive that may have lingering secrets on it:

Hogarty brought someone she introduced simply as “Miguel.” By this time, alas, my laptop, which was old, was in its death throes. After Miguel tried logging onto the laptop and encountered fatal errors, he pronounced it dead. Hogarty asked me whether it would be OK if they physically destroyed the hard drive. I’d bought a new laptop and had managed to retrieve from the old one everything that I cared about, so I agreed.

They had brought no tools with them. Hogarty was about to canvass the building for a screwdriver, but I had a pending meeting elsewhere, so Miguel made do by fashioning a crude implement from the metal clip of his pen. He pried the back cover off the computer and removed the hard drive and memory board.

The situation grew darkly comic. They didn’t have a hammer, so they started debating how to smash the hard drive. I suggested they smack it against the corner of the table that was in the room. That didn’t do much. Hogarty then had an idea to put the thing on the floor and use a table leg on it. Miguel put down the hard drive, picked up the table and brought it down several times forcefully. The noise resounded, but the hard drive was impervious. One of the table legs became bent from the procedure.

Next, Miguel tried attacking the hard drive with his homemade tool. Soon he’d managed to pry off the hard drive cover and commenced scratching at the components. Meanwhile, Hogarty took the memory board and began banging on it on the floor with a chair leg. The memory board was weaker than the hard drive and cracked in several places. Then she held the memory board in her hands and tried bending it, but Miguel stopped her, warning that he’d seen someone get cut badly doing that — evidently they’d done this sort of thing before.

I found myself thinking of the Samsonite Gorilla, the TV commercial from the 1970s in which a gorilla stomps on a piece of luggage that just won’t break. I thought: “These people are entrusted with our national security?”

I don’t want to compare apples and oranges, but do you remember when the LA Times reported that stolen hard drives from the US military were on sale at an Afghan bazaar? It’s nice to know where the administration’s priorities lie. Maybe we need to send Miguel to Afghanistan.

Update: One more note, from Russ Feingold today:

“I sit on the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees, and I am one of the few members of this body who has been fully briefed on the warrantless wiretapping program. And, based on what I know, I can promise that if more information is declassified about the program in the future, as is likely to happen either due to the Inspector General report, the election of a new President, or simply the passage of time, members of this body will regret that we passed this legislation. I am also familiar with the collection activities that have been conducted under the Protect America Act and will continue under this bill. I invite any of my colleagues who wish to know more about those activities to come speak to me in a classified setting. Publicly, all I can say is that I have serious concerns about how those activities may have impacted the civil liberties of Americans. If we grant these new powers to the government and the effects become known to the American people, we will realize what a mistake it was, of that I am sure.”

Update II: It’s official, America lost

The Senate has approved a bill overhauling the rules on secret government eavesdropping and granting immunity to telecom companies that helped listen in on Americans after Sept. 11.

The Senate passed the bill Wednesday, 69-28. It turned back three amendments that would have watered down, delayed or stripped away the immunity provision demanded by President Bush.

When the president signs the bill, as expected, it will effectively dismiss some 40 lawsuits filed against telecommunications companies for alleged violations of wiretapping and privacy laws.

In particular, I’d like to call out my senators Barbara Boxer for being an excellent senator and voting her liberal conscience, and Dianne Feinstein, for being a total asshole.

On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 3:50 AM, Matt wrote:

I’ve been basically ignoring everything coming out of that side just because I can only process so much insanity. This, though, is classic nuts (from one of their press releases):

“The McCain administration would reserve all savings from victory in the Iraq and Afghanistan operations in the fight against Islamic extremists for reducing the deficit. Since all their costs were financed with deficit spending, all their savings must go to deficit reduction.”

Wait, what? We’re suddenly going to A. “win” and then B. make a whole buncha money off said “win”?

On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 4:16 PM, Jeff Dinsmore wrote:

Uh … pardon?

On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 4:24 PM, Matt wrote:

What are you, retarded? What part don’t you understand, man? IT MAKES PERFECT SENSE!

On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 4:40 PM, Jeff Dinsmore wrote:

Well, I guess I must not have as firm a grasp of economic realities as the McCain campaign. I also like these parts of his platform:

- Once the war on disease is won by the McCain Science Laboratory, the healthcare industry is going to be able to reinvest the profits it makes from treating nonexistent diseases into affordable healthcare for all.
- The McCain global warming stoppage will help cure obese children by giving them lots of new, sun-shiney oceans to swim in.
- Genetically engineered minks will bring great profits to American fur-traders who will use these profits to buy invisibility cloaks for our new Martian friends, thus ensuring democracy’s iron-fisted reign over the civilized world.

Apologies for turning into a complete bore over the last week, but I strongly believe that we need to make our voices heard about this FISA bill. Senator Chris Dodd, co-sponsor of the Dodd-Feingold-Leahy amendment to strip telecom immunity from the FISA bill, had a good piece about why this bill matters in the Huffington Post today. Here it is printed in its entirety. I’ve included a handy-dandy tool at the end of the post that you can use to call your senators without even lifting a finger.

That the United States Senate would even have to debate whether to uphold the rule of law is infuriating enough. But two weeks ago, the contrast in priorities became too much: as the Senate refused to address the tide of foreclosures impacting more than 8,000 people every day, it was poised and ready to provide immunity to giant corporations that may have broken the law.

So, I did what I felt I had to: I said no.

By blocking a vote on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the fight to stop retroactive immunity goes on — for another week anyway. The Senate will take the bill up again this week as it returns from the July 4th recess.

Of course, such procedural jujitsu was merely the latest twist in a fight that has now spanned nearly a year. During that time, I have used every forum available to me — from the Senate floor to the presidential campaign to town halls around the country — to talk about the importance of the rule of law and why a seemingly obscure dispute between government and corporations in our legal system is critical to upholding it.

A brief overview: we learned after September 11, 2001 that giant telecom companies worked with this administration to compile Americans’ private, domestic communications records into a database of enormous scale and scope. The Bush administration appears to have convinced those corporations to spy on Americans for five years, in secret and without a warrant.

That we know this happened is not because the government told us — they say the matter is classified. And it is not because one of the telecoms told us. We may not have known any of this at all were it not for serious investigative journalists. And we wouldn’t know how deep the problem really went without an Internet technician by the name of Mark Klein, a 22-year veteran of AT&T who one day at work found a switch that channeled Internet traffic culled from millions of living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens and offices across the nation to a secret room operated by the National Security Agency. Mr. Klein was old enough to remember when a law was passed to prevent this sort of unchecked spying operation from happening:

FISA — a law written back in 1978 in the wake of Watergate that ensured the government had both the tools it needed to defend the country and a process in place for judicial review to put checks on executive authority.

Most agree that this law needs to be modernized, as it has been many times over the years. But this time, the president is asking Congress to do something much more: to shield the telecoms from any judicial review of their actions. He wants Congress to declare spying without a warrant both constitutional and necessary to defend this country.

It is neither.

That is why I have done everything I can to stop retroactive immunity from being included in the FISA bill. As written, this bill does not say, “Trust the American people.” It does not say, “Trust the courts and judges and juries to come to just decisions” about what happened at the telecoms. Rather, retroactive immunity sends this message:

“Trust me” — a message that comes straight from the mouth of President Bush. I would never take “trust me” for an answer, not even in the best of times. Not even from a president on Mount Rushmore.

Besides, what exactly is the basis for that trust? Retroactive immunity may be a disgrace in itself, but it is merely the latest link in a long chain of abuses when it comes to contempt for the rule of law — from the Justice Department basing its work on political calculations, to the shame of Abu Ghraib, to the passage of the Military Commissions Act, which sanctioned torture. The list goes on and on.

To many around the world, that is what America has become. Where Normandy, the Marshall Plan, and the Nuremberg trials invoked the image of America for previous generations, those coming of age today will now think of Guantanamo, waterboarding, and torture. People now have a basis upon which to ask whether the president serves the law or the law serves the president.

Did the telecoms break the law? I don’t know.

But I am sure that if we pass retroactive immunity we’ll never know. A handful of favored corporations will remain unchallenged. Their arguments will never be heard in a court of law. The truth behind this unprecedented domestic spying will never see light. And the cases will be closed forever.

I’m under no illusion that we will be able to keep this bill from the president’s desk forever; two weeks ago, I was disappointed that we could only muster 15 votes out of the necessary 41 to block consideration of FISA.

But every second we can continue to raise this issue and hold this Administration’s feet to the fire for its contempt for the rule of law these last seven years is another opportunity to keep asking:

When we undermine the rule of law, do we make our nation more secure — or less?

Over the next few days, that’s the question we’ll be asking. But I think we already know the answer.

Please call your senators, and urge them to vote IN FAVOR of the Dodd-Feingold-Leahy Amendment (S.A. 5064 to H.R. 6304). NO on cloture, and a NO vote on the final bill. It will take 2 minutes out of your day and it may make a difference. Click the link below to get your senators’ numbers.

(And many apologies for again presenting information suggesting that the telecoms will never be punished in a court of law if the FISA bill is passed, but this time the blame is on Senator Dodd.)

Sarah and I had a discussion the other day in which she asked me, “why should the telecom companies be prosecuted when the president was the one who broke the law?” And it’s a good question which is, I think, being used by a lot of people to justify giving them immunity. Glenn Greenwald answers this question in a very thoughtful way today, and I encourage you to read it if you’re interested.

The basic point is that, even if the President asked the telecoms to give up our private data, it was still against the law. I’m sure a lot of people think, “if George Bush asked me to break the law, I wouldn’t have a choice.” But in this country, when given the choice between breaking the law and honoring the request of your president, you are obligated to obey the law. George Bush doesn’t have the power to break the law, and he also doesn’t have the power to force other people to break the law. Now, I’d be scared shitless if I had to disobey a presidential order, but the telecom companies are vastly more powerful than I am, and they knew full well going into this mess that the were breaking the law. Maybe they had great reasoning behind their actions … but if this FISA bill passes, we’ll never know, because they won’t be obligated to explain their actions in a court of law.

So anyway, read the article, and if you’re moved enough to do something about it, please visit this link to call your senators and urge them to strip retroactive immunity from the FISA bill. I made the calls the other day, and it was totally easy. You don’t need to know a lot of impressive facts and figures … just follow the script given on the website, the Senators’ assistants will note your opinion, and you will have had the say you deserve as a member of a Democracy. And that’s the last I’ll say about it.

Happy Independence Day!

Hilarious.

Obama came out a few days ago and reversed his position on the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) bill that’s before the Senate right now. This bill would give telecommunication companies (phone and/or Internet service providers a la AT&T) retroactive immunity from prosecution for breaking the law.

Basically, the Bush administration went to the telecoms and said, “we’d like the power to monitor people’s phone calls and emails without ever asking for permission.” There were many rules in place that would allow the administration to do this with permission, but I guess they didn’t want to bother with all that messy paperwork. Most of the telecoms said yes … I’m pretty sure one of the major firms refused, but don’t quote me on that.

So now, there’s a bill before the Senate that will change the law to say that spying on us without permission was okay, it will be okay in the future, and the telecoms were justified in breaking the law when the president asked them to. Obama has spoken strongly against this legislation in the past, but just last week he changed his mind, presumably so he won’t look soft on terrorism.

Russ Feingold isn’t taking this lying down (see the awesome video below). He’s continuing to fight the bill, and this week they managed to push the vote back past the July 4th weekend. If you think it’s bullshit that our presidential candidate would support this violation of our privacy, please join this group on his website that’s urging him to change his mind. I’m sure there are people you can call, but I’ll give you that info when I get it. And Harmon … I know you’re an Obama man … if you have any suggestions, please contribute!