Here is the info from the ACLU.
"This fight is not over. We intend to challenge this bill as soon as President Bush signs it into law"The bill essentially grants absolute retroactive immunity to telecommunication companies that facilitated the president’s warrantless wiretapping program over the last seven years by ensuring the dismissal of court cases pending against those companies. The test for the companies’ right to immunity is not whether the government certifications they acted on were actually legal – only whether they were issued. Because it is public knowledge that certifications were issued, all of the pending cases will be summarily dismissed. This means Americans may never learn the truth about what the companies and the government did with our private communications.
“With one vote, Congress has strengthened the executive branch, weakened the judiciary and rendered itself irrelevant,” said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “This bill – soon to be law – is a constitutional nightmare. Americans should know that if this legislation is enacted and upheld, what they say on international phone calls or emails is no longer private. The government can listen in without having a specific reason to do so. Our rights as Americans have been curtailed and our privacy can no longer be assumed.”
In advance of the president’s signature, the ACLU announced its plan to challenge the new law in court.
“This fight is not over. We intend to challenge this bill as soon as President Bush signs it into law,” said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project. “The bill allows the warrantless and dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international telephone and email communications. It plainly violates the Fourth Amendment.”
For more information, go to:
www.aclu.org/fisa
Here is the information from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
We will fight this unconstitutional grant of immunity in the courtroom and in the Congress, requesting repeal of the immunity in the next session.
Washington, D.C. - The U.S. Senate this afternoon passed the FISA Amendments Act, broadly expanding the president's warrantless surveillance authority and unconstitutionally granting retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that participated in the president's illegal domestic wiretapping program. The House of Representatives passed the same bill last month, and President Bush is expected to sign the legislation into law shortly.
"It is an immeasurable tragedy that just after its return from the Fourth of July holiday, the Senate has chosen to pass a bill that betrays the spirit of 1776 by radically expanding the president's spying powers and granting immunity to the companies that colluded in his illegal surveillance program," said Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). "This so-called compromise bill represents a shameful capitulation to the overreaching demands of an imperial president. As Senator Leahy put it in yesterday's debate, the retroactive immunity provision of the bill upends the scales of justice and makes Congress and the courts handmaidens to the White House's cover-up of its illegal surveillance program."
....""Even though Congress has failed to protect the privacy of Americans and uphold the rule of law, we will not abandon our defense of liberty. We will fight this unconstitutional grant of immunity in the courtroom and in the Congress, requesting repeal of the immunity in the next session, while seeking justice from the Judiciary. Nor can the lawless officials who approved this massive violation of Americans' rights rest easy, for we will file a new suit against the government and challenge warrantless wiretapping, past, present and future."
The two groups are among the
27 groups who opposed this bill.American Civil Liberties Union
American Library Association
Arab-America Anti-Discrimination Committee
Association of Research Libraries
Bill of Rights Defense Committee
Center for American Progress Action Fund
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for National Security Studies
Congressman Bob Barr, Liberty Strategies
Defending Dissent Foundation
Doug Bandow, Vice President for Policy, Citizen Outreach Project
DownsizeDC.org, Inc.
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Fairfax County Privacy Council
Friends Committee on National Legislation
League of Women Voters of the United States
Liberty Coalition
MAS Freedom
OMB Watch
Open Society Policy Center
OpenTheGovernment.org
People For the American Way
Privacy Lives
Republican Liberty Caucus
The Multiracial Activist
United Methodist Church, General Board of Church and Society
U.S. Bill of Rights Foundation
Actually 28, at least, as they do not have Democracy for America listed.
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