Among the many other reasons not to engage in a grand bargain during the lame duck session is that Congress actually needs to get busy with other matters. For a variety of reasons, mainly that they’re not good at their job, Congress left a multitude of items on the table for the lame duck, many [...]

Today, the House will vote on the extension of the FISA Amendments Act, a bill that was well-known to most Americans, especially on the left, in 2008, but which has gotten little if any notice these days. The bill not only granted retroactive immunity to telecom companies that cooperated in the warrantless surveillance of US [...]

You can pretty well judge priorities in Washington simply by a matter of speed. If issues sit out there forever without being addressed, the political powers that be don’t really care about them. If they get attended to right away, they must have a certain importance attached. And this isn’t about lip service, but follow-through. [...]

Eric Lichtblau, one of the reporting team who exposed President Bush’s warrantless surveillance program, takes a look at its aftermath; with telecoms receiving immunity, police departments feel no compunction against tracking people by their cell phone. Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used [...]

A federal court has upheld on appeal a ruling that telecom companies can receive legal immunity from Congress for participating in the warrantless wiretapping program under George W. Bush. A U.S. appeals panel on Thursday upheld the constitutionality of a federal law that grants immunity to telecommunications companies that assist the U.S. government in conducting [...]

I know Marcy has covered the hell out of this already, but clearly Judge Vaughn Walker’s ruling in the Al Haramain case is a huge deal. There never was going to be before, or likely will be again, a case as cut and dried as Al Haramain. In this instance, the government accidentally handed over [...]