Chris Dodd for President

Today's New York Times includes a long story by James Risen, Eric Lichtblau, and Scott Shane on previously unreported domestic surveillance activity. The report details further involvement between telecommunications companies, the NSA, and other intelligence agencies. Once again, we find out that the telecoms were engaging in illegal behavior at the behest of the Bush administration and handed over countless records and pieces of information about Americans without warrant.

The article documents expanded surveillance operations between the Bush administration and telecom companies before 9/11, as well as at least one massive domestic surveillance operation taking place unrelated to terrorism.

The N.S.A.’s reliance on telecommunications companies is broader and deeper than ever before, according to government and industry officials, yet that alliance is strained by legal worries and the fear of public exposure.

To detect narcotics trafficking, for example, the government has been collecting the phone records of thousands of Americans and others inside the United States who call people in Latin America, according to several government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the program remains classified. But in 2004, one major phone carrier balked at turning over its customers’ records. Worried about possible privacy violations or public relations problems, company executives declined to help the operation, which has not been previously disclosed.

In a separate N.S.A. project, executives at a Denver phone carrier, Qwest, refused in early 2001 to give the agency access to their most localized communications switches, which primarily carry domestic calls, according to people aware of the request, which has not been previously reported. They say the arrangement could have permitted neighborhood-by-neighborhood surveillance of phone traffic without a court order, which alarmed them. (Emphasis added)

The bolded portions are key, as we learn that phone records of Americans are being collected to discourage not terrorism, but the drug trade. It is not clear that the records collected are of people suspected of any wrongdoing, but the program is suspicious enough for one major telecom company to turn down the Bush administration's request to hand over records. Beyond that, Qwest was asked to give the NSA the ability to tap into local, domestic phone calls in such a way as to guarantee that the government would tap into countless calls without warrant or suspicion of guilt.

While the Times article goes on in far greater detail, it is clear from the start that these are shocking revelations that signify the extent to which we do not yet fully know what the Bush administration and the telecom companies have done in partnership to violate the privacy and rights of the American public.

Glenn Greenwald, long an expert on illegal domestic surveillance under the Bush administration, responds with the sober outrage we've come to expect from someone who tracks how the Bush administration and the telecom companies have worked together to undermine the rule of law during the course of the last seven years. Greenwald writes:

The telecom industry reaps untold profit as a result of its vast and expanding government contracts. While they -- like everyone else in the world -- would prefer to be immune from consequences when they break the law, the idea that they are going to terminate this relationship if they do not receive amnesty is insultingly false on its face.
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[Retroactive immunity advocates are] now stating outright that we need to provide amnesty when telecoms break the law, otherwise they won't continue to do so in the future -- as though that's a bad thing. But that's not a bad thing. It's vital that telecoms know that they cannot break our laws with impunity. Without that, we have no safeguards of any kind against how we are spied on and how those spying powers are abused. And if our largest private corporations with the most expensive lobbyists are free to break our laws, then we literally -- not rhetorically, but literally -- cease to be a country that lives under the rule of law.

Greenwald goes on to offer some solid advice for how telecom companies can avoid future legal troubles. "But more significantly still, there is a very clear and easy way for telecoms to avoid lawsuits in the absence of amnesty: do not break the law."

McJoan of Daily Kos makes an interesting suggestion about how the Senate should respond to the latest news on domestic surveillance.

Congress should not be voting on any amnesty for the telcos until full investigations of these new revelations have been conducted. The pending legislation on FISA, or at least this provision of it, should be shelved until Congress has a full picture of what these companies have been doing on behalf of our government.

This makes intuitive sense. No matter what one thinks about retroactive immunity, the knowledge that the telecom companies' behavior is worse than we previously thought should demand pause before continuing on. Rejecting retroactive immunity outright is the course of action that I believe we should take, but I would hope those who support amnesty would recognize the danger in rushing to judgment while new facts -- facts that reflect poorly on these companies -- continue to surface.

The New York Times editorial board takes a look at the FISA legislation before Congress and takes strong positions advocating for oversight and limitations on executive authority. They explain some of the key issues of FISA reform legislation:

SUNSET The law must have an expiration date. Congress should not grant the government unending powers to spy on Americans. The Bush administration, predictably, wants just that. We support the House bill’s two-year expiration date.

COURTS AND WARRANTS Any new law must include real supervision by the special FISA court. The administration wants to gut the court’s powers, taking away the requirement for advance warrants for most eavesdropping on international communications originating or ending in the United States. The administration would allow the court to rule afterward on whether required procedures were followed, but strip the court of its remaining powers to enforce such a judgment. It is vital to retain provisions in the Senate Judiciary Committee’s bill that would make it clear that the government cannot just collect information in bulk — by, say, tapping all calls to and from Pakistan — but has to cite targets, including specific phone numbers and e-mail addresses.

Even if the government is legitimately targeting someone overseas in an eavesdropping operation, the 2007 law would permit it to collect vast databases that would include Americans at the other ends of those communications. Mr. Feingold is working on vital amendments that would restrict the ways the government could store and use such information.

The Senate bill would require a warrant to eavesdrop on an American who is in another country. The White House opposes this provision. It must be retained.

AMNESTY The telecommunications companies must not get amnesty. Lawsuits against them must be allowed to proceed, in the interest of the rule of law and also to force disclosure of the nature and extent of the lawless eavesdropping that began after Sept. 11, 2001.

The Times fails to address minimization of the scope of surveillance and data mining, though I would add it to the list of critical issues in FISA legislation.

Also, Glenn Greenwald rebuts some basic misconceptions about what the current round of FISA legislation does and does not do.

Peter Glenshaw, writing at NH News Links, has more on the way FISA and other rule of law issues are being discussed in the presidential debates. Glenshaw takes the opportunity to discuss FISA and praise Senator Dodd's leadership on the issue:

This is a big deal. The Bush administration has repeatedly and routinely sought to bypass judicial oversight in the matter of domestic spying. Simply put, they have ignored the law, ignored the courts, and then attempted to give telecom companies a get-out-of-jail card for the violations they made on behalf of the Bush administration. It's enough to make you wonder if the democracy Bush professes to love would resemble anything you and I understand to be the foundations of American government.

Dodd, alone among all of the Presidential candidates, was the first to draw a line in the sand on the issue of immunity for telecommunication companies who violated privacy and other security laws with their illegal wiretapping.

Not Hillary.

Not Obama.

Not Edwards.

None of them stood up and said, Enough....telecommunication companies who illegally collaborated with the Bush administration are responsible for their actions.

Only Dodd was willing to make this stand.

Glenshaw goes on to point out that the questions he hears voters ask in New Hampshire do address the rule of law and FISA. Voters get that these are important, even if the media refuses to give them attention in the debates. In my travels around the country with Senator Dodd, I've heard questions about the Constitution, torture, extraordinary rendition, wiretapping, and restoring the rule of law countless times. Almost every event we go to, people ask Chris Dodd about what he will do on these issues. It doesn't matter if we're in rural northern New Hampshire or the smallest farm towns in Iowa. Americans care deeply about the Constitution and they understand that the next President will have to commit to restoring the rule of law, or else the Bush administration's actions will take hold and really change who we are as a nation.
Glenshaw closes:

That's why Chris Dodd, even at this late hour, continues to make sense. He is the one candidate prepared to balance our moral values with political reality. And in this complicated era, an experienced hand at the wheel makes an enormous amount of sense.

We're glad that Peter Glenshaw recognizes Dodd's leadership on this issue and we're proud to have his support for Dodd's candidacy. As with many of the people who've endorsed Chris Dodd, Glenshaw's endorsement is steeped in a mutual care for the Constitution. With patriots like Glenshaw in Dodd's corner, we know that President Dodd would have a mandate to restore the Constitution on his first day in office.

The Albany Times Union has a great editorial today titled "Sen. Dodd's Principle." It praises Dodd's leadership in the fight to stop retroactive immunity from being passed in the Senate. Here's a large portion of the Times Union editorial:

In the House, which has just approved legislation that denies such retroactive immunity, Senator Dodd would be on the winning side of the issue. But the Senate is more sympathetic to the White House position on immunity. Dodd and a few of his colleagues, including Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., are the exceptions standing in the way. By contrast, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says the telecommunications companies shouldn't be punished for cooperating with the government. But Mr. Dodd is right to stand firm. This issue involved basic freedoms, which the White House has been more than willing to trample in the name of homeland security.

Both the White House and the Senate supporters of immunity argue that the government sought the customer records from the telecommunications companies in an attempt to track calls from suspected international terrorists to some people in the United States. No one -- Sen. Dodd included -- is arguing that the government had no right to conduct such a search. But Sen. Dodd rightly notes that there is a legal way to ask for such records -- by securing a court warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act -- and the way the White House went about it, by simply ignoring the FISA rules and asking the companies to cooperate.

Not every company did. The then head of Qwest Communications International refused to hand over the records without a warrant. Other telecommunications companies should have done likewise. "These companies have very strong, good legal departments here," Sen. Dodd said on "Meet the Press" recently. "The idea that companies would turn over thousands, if not millions, of private records, of individuals without a court order is an invasion of privacy, in my view. There's a way to do this, a legal way. They decided not to do it. ... There's been a consistent pattern by this administration ... to basically trample on the constitutional rights of people. ... That's of great concern to me."

If only Mr. Dodd's primary rivals were equally concerned, and outspoken. Instead, they seem more intent on jockeying for position by avoiding issues that might make them appear to be weak on national security. Credit Sen. Dodd for putting principle first, politics second.

Senator Chris Dodd today issued the following statement after a provision in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) granting immunity to companies who participated with the Bush Administration in violating the civil liberties of millions of Americans was taken out of the Senate bill.

"I'm heartened to see that the Senate Judiciary Committee has affirmed, as I and thousands of other people around the country have, that those telecommunications companies that participated with the Bush Administration in trampling millions of Americans' civil liberties should not receive retroactive immunity for their participation. This is a victory for the rule of law and everyone who cares about preserving our Constitution.

"Getting results begins with standing for principles that you believe in, stating your position clearly, and working toward that end.

"As the debate over retroactive immunity moves to the Senate floor, I'll take this opportunity to reiterate my pledge to filibuster any legislation that grants immunity in any form to these telecom companies."