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Mark · Site Admin Joined: 13 Nov 2007 Posts: 1052

How telecoms are attempting to buy amnesty from Congress

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/05/24/telecoms/index.html

Excerpt:

Let's pause for a brief minute to reflect on how ludicrous and deceptive -- laughably so -- are some of the main FISA/telecom claims that are being advanced. We continuously hear, for instance, that these poor, beleaguered telecoms need protection from the big, money-hungry plaintiffs' lawyers driving these "costly" surveillance lawsuits. One of the two organizations leading the litigation against the telecoms (along with the ACLU) is the non-profit group Electronic Frontiers Foundation. Here is what EFF's Kurt Opsahl wrote this week:

To put this into perspective, AT&T's spending for three months on lobbying alone is significantly more than the entire EFF budget for a whole year, from attorneys to sys admins, pencils to bandwidth.

And then there's the claim -- advanced by the likes of The Washington Post's Fred Hiatt, among others -- that it's a grave injustice to force these telecoms to incur attorneys fees in order to defend themselves against allegations that they broke the law because the litigation is so "costly." Yet here these telecoms are spending $1 million per month or more in order to send former government officials to pressure members of Congress to write our laws the way they want them to be written.