What Leadership Looks Like

Despite the diversity of candidates for the Democratic nomination, today the true face of leadership belongs to an aging white guy, Senator Chris Dodd.

Today the Senate began debate on a revision of the FISA electronic surveillance act. Ignoring a hold placed on the bill by Dodd (a senior member of his own party), Majority Leader Harry Reid brought to the floor a version of the bill containing controversial language providing retroactive immunity for telecomm companies involved in cooperating with the government on illegal surveillance. It was notable and disturbing that Senator Reid would move such a significant bill despite a hold, and also in the final hours before the holiday recess, when pressure to pass the bill with little debate would build.

Chris Dodd, the only Presidential candidate for whom defense of the rule of law seems to matter, left the campaign trail days before the Iowa caucus. He returned to appear on the Senate floor today and lead the debate against this bill. Supported by a handful of other Senators, including Kennedy and Feingold, Dodd raised sufficient complication that Senator Reid has withdrawn the bill from consideration until after the Senate returns from its upcoming recess. This move was due, in no small part, to the clear willingness of Senator Dodd to make good on his promise to engage in an old-fashioned filibuster.

Think Progress has video of part of Dodd's speech.

Senator Kennedy also gave a good speech against telecomm immunity, including one very simple point that needs frequent repetition:

Here’s another fact that no one should lose sight of. From the very beginning, telecommunications companies have always had immunity under FISA when they comply with lawful surveillance requests. In fact, the Senate Judiciary Committee worked closely with AT&T, and the company played a major role in drafting FISA’s immunity provisions in the 1970s.

To be completely protected from any liability whatever, all a company needs under FISA is a court order or an appropriate certification from the Attorney General. That’s it. Just get one of those two documents, and you’re off the hook.

So in this debate, let’s be clear that we’re not talking about protecting companies that complied with lawful surveillance requests. We’re talking about protecting companies that complied with surveillance requests that they knew were illegal.

That's right, the President wants these companies to have immunity for acts that were illegal, including ones that happened long before 9/11.

In a separate program, N.S.A. officials met with the Qwest executives in February 2001 and asked for more access to their phone system for surveillance operations, according to people familiar with the episode. The company declined, expressing concerns that the request was illegal without a court order.

While Qwest’s refusal was disclosed two months ago in court papers, the details of the N.S.A.’s request were not. The agency, those knowledgeable about the incident said, wanted to install monitoring equipment on Qwest’s “Class 5” switching facilities, which transmit the most localized calls. Limited international traffic also passes through the switches.

A government official said the N.S.A. intended to single out only foreigners on Qwest’s network, and added that the agency believed Joseph Nacchio, then the chief executive of Qwest, and other company officials misunderstood the agency’s proposal. Bob Toevs, a Qwest spokesman, said the company did not comment on matters of national security.

Other N.S.A. initiatives have stirred concerns among phone company workers. A lawsuit was filed in federal court in New Jersey challenging the agency’s wiretapping operations. It claims that in February 2001, just days before agency officials met with Qwest officials, the N.S.A. met with AT&T officials to discuss replicating a network center in Bedminster, N.J., to give the agency access to all the global phone and e-mail traffic that ran through it.

The accusations rely in large part on the assertions of a former engineer on the project. The engineer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said in an interview that he participated in numerous discussions with N.S.A. officials about the proposal. The officials, he said, discussed ways to duplicate the Bedminster system in Maryland so the agency “could listen in” with unfettered access to communications that it believed had intelligence value and store them for later review. There was no discussion of limiting the monitoring to international communications, he said.

“At some point,” he said, “I started feeling something isn’t right.”

Within two months of taking office, the Bush administration was talking to telecomms about massive wiretapping operations. Now they want the corporations that cooperated with them to be free from any accountability.

It would be nice if the sitting Senators vying for the Democratic nomination would stop flapping their gums about their commitment to "change" and "leadership" and actually do something that demonstrates it. Today, only one of them did. Christopher Dodd.

The bill is gone for now, and we can rest easy. (At least as easy as one can, knowing that the government is engaged in massive privacy violations.) But the bill will be back next year. There's a lot more work to be done.