Who needs a Fourth Amendment, anyway?
by Turkana Want to understand the problem with telecom immunity? Channeling dday, Dan Froomkin puts it in a nutshell: Bush on Thursday argued that the telecommunications companies shouldn’t be punished for patriotically carrying out legal orders. And he characterized the lawsuits as being the product of “class-action plaintiffs attorneys, [who] you know — I don’t want to try to get inside their head; I suspect they see, you know, a financial gravy train.” The Washington Post put Bush’s claim in context on Friday: “Two nonprofit groups are overseeing [the five coordinated, class-action lawsuits pending against the phone companies]: the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.” The Post also noted that “substantial damages would be awarded only if courts rule that they participated in illegal surveillance affecting millions of people, not just communications involving terrorism suspects overseas.” Even if the orders were ille
