Phone Companies Dial $, Rockefeller Picks Up

From the New York Times, 10/22/2007:

"Executives at the two biggest phone companies contributed more than $42,000 in political donations to Senator John D. Rockefeller IV this year while seeking his support for legal immunity for businesses participating in National Security Agency eavesdropping.

"The surge in contributions came from a Who’s Who of executives at the companies, AT&T and Verizon, starting with the chief executives and including at least 50 executives and lawyers at the two utilities, according to campaign finance reports.

"The money came primarily from a fund-raiser that Verizon held for Mr. Rockefeller in March in New York and another that AT&T sponsored for him in May in San Antonio.

"Mr. Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, emerged last week as the most important supporter of immunity in devising a compromise plan with Senate Republicans and the Bush administration."

This has to do with a new warrantless surveillance bill that will come before Congress in the coming months. The bill reworks what's known as FISA, or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The first FISA legislation came out in the 1970s. The new bill would scrap a hastily passed revision of FISA that Congress rubber-stamped in August.

Rockefeller (WV) chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee. Last week, he came out in support of granting retroactive immunity to telecomm companies that allowed the government to access without a warrant what under the Constitution were presumptively protected communications. These eavesdropping episodes occurred in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks when President Bush authorized a program of warrantless wiretapping.

Arguably, the phone company capitulations constitute a breach of contract with those customers whose information and/or communications were seized by the government without a court order.

For a time, it was unclear whether the Democrats in Congress would grant telecomm companies retroactive immunity. A version of the bill granting immunity to phone companies passed the Senate Intelligence committee last week.

However, House Democrats have so far been unwilling to extend immunity to the phone companies under the House version of the new bill.

As the article mentions, the Rockefeller fundraisers took place in San Antonio and New York City. Rockefeller represents West Virginia. He is up for re-election in 2008.

I will be looking closely at this bill when it is under debate in the Senate. I fully expect to hear a scrupulous critique of it from Russ Feingold (WI).