You have stated, as fact, that these things weren’t illegal. Who told you that?

We have a mechanism for deciding whether things are legal or not, you know. They’re called courts. And I actually agree that the U.S., as a civil society, is far too litigious. The problem is that the reason this country is so litigious is because civil court is pretty much the only venue a citizen has for achieving redress if they’re wronged by an entity much more powerful than they are, such as a corporation. You wouldn’t have to sue a company for, say, polluting your drinking water if you could rely on the EPA to go after them. You wouldn’t have to sue a telecom company for violating your Constitutional rights if you could rely on, say, the Attorney General’s office to go after them. Hell, if you could realistically think, “The Feds haven’t gone after these guys, and you know there would’ve been a huge internal investigation when this all came to light if anything fishy was going on, so it must have been by-the-book,” then I think you’d be right.

Though immunity being granted by the same entity that’s requesting the info seems like a conflict of interest to me.

Ya think? That’s the entire purpose of having coequal branches of government to check and/or balance each other.

This has nothing to do with fearing the administration over the other branches. You are basically trying to have telecomes do what the a democratic congress cannot. And again, they aren’t being given blanket immunity for everything. They are being given immunity for giving calling data, which in it of itself does not require a warrant. Again the only reason that its an issue is because of the 1934 law which had to do anti competive business practices not privacy concerns…

Look, you may or may not want Google to give all the terms that are searched for given to the governement, but if 1) Google makes no privacy claim, and 2) they don’t give specifics as to who searched for what, it seems to me not a voilation of my civil rights. I Look at the telecom data the same way.

But what if the suits do have merit, and the telecom companies get hit for enormous amounts of damages? And so they really do stop cooperating with the government from the start because they fear a lawsuit. That would actually be a feature, not a bug. If giant communications conglomerates fear the coequal branches of government, if they worry that the Congress and the courts will have their collective ass if they do something as facially illegal as assist the government in eavesdropping without a warrant, that’s all to the good. If it makes telecom companies tell the secret police to pound sand until they can show a warrant, voila! The system works!

I think the reason why there is talk of immunity for the telecoms is specifically to prevent this kind of law suit and the cost associated with it, being put on the telecoms. If the government asks for something, especially if it doesn’t involve prosecuting you, you cooperate. Let others worry about whether the government should have asked for it in the first place. Unless their was some specific law that was broken it shouldn’t be an issue. As best i can google, it some law from 1934 about telecoms giving out customer calling information. Perhaps they are in violation of that. But why should individuals get to sue them over what should be a regulatory fine? That’s the real reason for the immunity. The government can be sued and information used to prosecute someone could be thrown out, but this is a way to get people not to cooperate with the government from the start because they fear a lawsuit,.

The real question to ask, though, is if no one broke any laws, why are they so keen on getting this immunity?

There’s no one in the telecom’s risk management/compliance department intimately familiar with FISA and, more importantly, the interpretation of FISA, so sure, they deferred to the government.

If anything, I think they lacked due dilligence in covering their asses. The telecoms should’ve asked for a 2nd opinion from the Attorney General’s office, or maybe the Inspector General. Then they’d make a better case for immunity. And they shouldn’t have followed such a shady route towards trying to get immunity. But though they were monkeys that doesn’t necessarily justify suing them for doing what they thought they were supposed to do.