Greetings. It appears that once again Congress is preparing to grant the telephone companies retroactive immunity for their illegal Bush administration wiretapping operations. Negotiators have built in a meaningless new district court aspect but in reality it's still plain old immunity.

The real issue here isn't whether the telcos were just "following orders" or not, but rather the more important point that if immunity is granted, we likely lose any significant ability to ever find out how far into the illicit wiretapping depths the administration was willing to go, since the raft of pending lawsuits would probably be dismissed.

This is unacceptable. The House "compromise" should be rejected.

--Lauren--