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Note: As the FCC and many states rush to give the telcos favorable video franchising legislation, we still wonder why consumers (i.e citizens) would want to receive phone, data and video services from companies that they know can monitor and provide government agencies with surveillance information on their phone/data activities and TV viewing habits.

from: NewsWeek

Terror Watch: A Secret Lobbying Campaign
The secret lobbying campaign your phone company doesn't want you to know about

WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek

Sept. 20, 2007 - The nation’s biggest telecommunications companies, working closely with the White House, have mounted a secretive lobbying campaign to get Congress to quickly approve a measure wiping out all private lawsuits against them for assisting the U.S. intelligence community’s warrantless surveillance programs.

The campaign—which involves some of Washington's most prominent lobbying and law firms—has taken on new urgency in recent weeks because of fears that a U.S. appellate court in San Francisco is poised to rule that the lawsuits should be allowed to proceed.

If that happens, the telecom companies say, they may be forced to terminate their cooperation with the U.S. intelligence community—or risk potentially crippling damage awards for allegedly turning over personal information about their customers to the government without a judicial warrant.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say the U.S. intelligence community is in a near-panic about this,” said one communications industry lawyer familiar with the debate who asked not to be publicly identified because of the sensitivity surrounding the issue.

But critics say the language proposed by the White House—drafted in close cooperation with the industry officials—is so extraordinarily broad that it would provide retroactive immunity for all past telecom actions related to the surveillance program. Its practical effect, they argue, would be to shut down any independent judicial or state inquires into how the companies have assisted the government in eavesdropping on the telephone calls and e-mails of U.S. residents in the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks.

“It’s clear the goal is to kill our case," said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based privacy group that filed the main lawsuit against the telecoms after The New York Times first disclosed, in December 2005, that President Bush had approved a secret program to monitor the phone conversations of U.S. residents without first seeking judicial warrants. The White House subsequently confirmed that it had authorized the National Security Agency to conduct what it called a “terrorist surveillance program” aimed at communications between suspected terrorists overseas and individuals inside the United States. But the administration has also intervened, unsuccessfully so far, to try to block the lawsuit from proceeding and has consistently refused to discuss any details about the extent of the program—rebuffing repeated congressional requests for key legal memos about it.

"They are trying to completely immunize this [the surveillance program] from any kind of judicial review,” added Cohn. “I find it a little shocking that Congress would participate in the covering up of what has been going on."

But congressional staffers said this week that some version of the proposal is likely to pass—in part because of a high-pressure lobbying campaign warning of dire consequences if the lawsuits proceed. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell seemed to raise the stakes recently when he contended in an interview with the El Paso Times that the private lawsuits could “bankrupt these companies.”

Among those coordinating the industry’s effort are two well-connected capital players who both worked for President George H.W. Bush: Verizon general counsel William Barr, who served as attorney general under 41, and AT&T senior executive vice president James Cicconi, who was the elder Bush's deputy chief of staff.

Working with them are a battery of major D.C. lobbyists and lawyers who are providing "strategic advice" to the companies on the issue, according to sources familiar with the campaign who asked not to be identified talking about it. Among the players, these sources said: powerhouse Republican lobbyists Charlie Black and Wayne Berman (who represent AT&T and Verizon, respectively), former GOP senator and U.S. ambassador to Germany Dan Coats (a lawyer at King & Spaulding who is representing Sprint), former Democratic Party strategist and one-time assistant secretary of State Tom Donilon (who represents Verizon), former deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick (whose law firm also represents Verizon) and Brad Berenson, a former assistant White House counsel under President George W. Bush who now represents AT&T.

Because of the extreme secrecy surrounding the warrantless surveillance program, few if any of the lobbyists and lawyers are prepared to speak publicly about their role. “My client requires me not to talk to the press,” said the normally loquacious Black when asked by NEWSWEEK about his lobbying for AT&T. Berman and Berenson also declined comment. Gorelick confirmed that she is providing "strategic advice," not lobbying for Verizon. Coats and Donilon did not respond to requests for comment.

But according to three industry sources, these and other players have been conferring with each other over legislative strategy and targeting key lawmakers and staffers, especially those on the House and Senate Intelligence and Judiciary Committees. The lobbyists have set up meetings and arranged conference calls, pressing the argument that failure to provide protection to the companies could interfere with the vital assistance they say the telecom industry has provided the intelligence community in monitoring the communications of Al Qaeda and other terrorist operations overseas.

The case for new legislation retroactively giving telecoms companies protection against private lawsuits—including lawsuits already pending—was outlined this week by Kenneth Wainstein, assistant attorney general for national security. At a House Judiciary Committee hearing chaired by Rep. John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, Wainstein said that giving telecoms companies retroactive liability was a matter of "general fairness."

"I think it's sort of fundamentally unfair and just not right to—if a company allegedly assisted the government in its national-security efforts, in an effort to defend the country at a time of peril, that they then get turned around and face tremendously costly litigation and maybe even crushing liability for having helped the United States government at a time of need ... it's just not right," Wainstein testified.

Wainstein also claimed that "every time we have one of these lawsuits, very sensitive information gets discussed and gets leaked out, disseminated out in the public. And our adversaries are smart, both the terrorists who might be over in, you know, someplace in the Middle East are smart, and then the governments that might be our adversaries are tremendously sophisticated, and they're gleaning all this information that gets out." Wainstein also said that a telecom company's overseas assets could be threatened if its collaboration in U.S. espionage efforts were confirmed in a court case.

The campaign for industry protection was initially launched last summer when administration and industry officials first tried to get the immunity provision included in the Protect America Act—a measure passed by Congress and signed by President Bush on Aug. 5 that allowed the surveillance program to continue and temporarily gave the National Security Agency expanded eavesdropping powers. At the time, Democrats in Congress balked at including the kind of sweeping retroactive civil immunity protections that the industry sought.

But then, on Aug. 15, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco heard oral arguments in a Justice Department motion to block the Electronic Frontier Foundation lawsuit against AT&T. More than 40 other civil suits filed against the telecoms—many of them seeking billions of dollars in damages—had been consolidated with the EFF lawsuit. But the Justice Department had sought to block the lawsuits under the “state privilege” doctrine, which can require the dismissal of suits that might endanger national security.

The three-judge panel, made up entirely of Democratic appointees, seemed openly skeptical of the Justice Department’s arguments, prompting many court observers to conclude that the panel was likely to issue a ruling permitting the lawsuits to proceed. At one point in the proceedings, one of the judges, Harry Pregerson, a Jimmy Carter appointee, appeared annoyed with the Justice Department lawyer, Gregory Garre. The judge wanted Garre to provide direct answers to questions about the scope of the just-passed surveillance law, according to press reports. When Garre tried to explain that the law was complicated, Pregerson shot back: “Can’t be any more complicated than my phone bill.”

The administration is keeping up pressure on Congress for quick action on the new version of the surveillance law—including an immunity provision for telecoms—which will take effect when the Protect America Act expires early next year. Congressional staffers say that Democrats are likely to go along with some version of the proposal. But Democratic leaders, who say they were stampeded into passing the law last summer, are insisting on having more thorough hearings and forcing the administration to turn over documents on the surveillance program. If the telecoms want immunity, some Democrats say, the White House should at least say what it is they need immunity for.