IP Democracy: Telcos May Oppose New Wiretapping Law

Leveraging the last-minute chaotic crush characteristic of any Congress as it races toward recess, the Bush administration pushed through a bill, signed into law already, that expands the scope of its ability to eavesdrop on Americans’ phone conversations or tap into email without a court-ordered warrant. The bill more or less legalizes the scandalous NSA domestic spying program that caused such an uproar in late 2005.

Although it’s hard to say for sure based on the press reports (any maybe that’s because so much surrounding the NSA’s ability to wiretap Americans is conducted in secret, including judicial review via secret courts), it sounds like the bill permits the federal government to wiretap an American citizen if the person is engaged in conversation with someone who is “reasonably believed” to be overseas. No court-ordered warrant is needed for this monitoring, just approval by the attorney general and the director of national intelligence.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that telcos might fight the law because it gives the feds the right to force them to cooperate with this program based solely on the order of Alberto Gonzales and Mike McConnell. Reading between the lines, it sounds as if the telcos, which have been hit with massive lawsuits in the wake of the NSA wiretapping scandal for their cooperation in the spying, fear that only court-ordered warrants will withstand legal appeals.

In other words, this bill, despite legitimizing the NSA program, might not protect the telcos from legal liability even though that was one key reason the legislation was crafted. The telcos think the law is destined to be overturned.

The bill is supposedly slated to sunset in six months, but as the Huffington Post’s David Bromwich points out, weak-willed Democrats are just as unlikely to reverse the wiretapping expansion in six months as they were to have opposed it in the first place. So, if the telecom industry is really unhappy with how the bill turned out, a long-term legal fight between the telcos and the feds may be in the offing.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on August 6, 2007 9:47 AM to IP Democracy