ase Dismissed?
The secret lobbying campaign your phone company doesn't want you to
know about

By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek Updated: 4:00 a.m. PT Sept 20, 2007


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.