For those of you who haven’t been following, there’s been a push in Congress to grant telecom companies retroactive immunity for having helped the NSA violate FISA and illegally1 perform domestic electronic surveillance.2 But that’s a whole other topic.

What has me completely nonplussed is the argument being made by the anti-rule-of-law3 senators: That unless we grant retroactive immunity, telecom companies won’t cooperate with us anymore. Even more astonishing is that nobody is challenging this crap.

There are really only two possible interpretations of what they are saying:

  1. If we don’t grant immunity, then telcos will stop cooperating with lawful requests. In other words, they’ll break the law.
  2. If we don’t grant immunity, then telcos will stop cooperating with unlawful requests. That is, they’ll comply with the law.

What is complicated about this? Why is this stuff even being repeated, not to mention challenged?

  1. This isn’t a gray area… FISA is blackletter law on this. [↩]
  2. That means spying. On you. [↩]
  3. They’d say “pro-immunity”. [↩]