The symbiotic merging of our society into full-fledged Corporate State continues….

The Bush administration wants the power to grant legal immunity to telecommunications companies that are slapped with privacy suits for cooperating with the White House’s controversial warrantless eavesdropping program.

The authority would effectively shut down dozens of lawsuits filed against telecommunications companies accused of helping set up the program.

Here is a money shot (literally) line from this piece from The New York Times…

National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell considers the issue a key element of any legislation that Congress considers this fall to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA.

Trying to make his point, McConnell recently confirmed that the private sector assisted with the surveillance work — and faces lawsuits. ‘’If you play out the suits at the value they’re claimed, it would bankrupt these companies,'’ McConnell told the El Paso (Texas) Times in an interview posted online last week.

Is it a legitimate question to ask why in regards to this important issue the pre-eminent concern of the National Intelligence Director, a so-called ‘public servant’, is not whether the future protection of the personal freedoms and liberties of Americans is at risk of invasive and unaccountable power challenging the very fabric of our understanding of the republic, but is rather instead the protection of the financial status of global telecommunications corporations, the same corporations which are being charged with serious transgressions against those very freedoms?

Another interesting comment….

Conventional wisdom has long been that the bulk of the surveillance operations — groundbreaking because they lacked judicial oversight — involved primarily telephone calls. However, officials say the Bush administration’s program frequently went after e-mail and other Internet traffic, which al-Qaida has embraced as a key means of communication.

So THAT is why the internet needs to be controlled by these same corporations! Its a tool of al-Qaida and we need to make sure we let AT&T control the flow of content in order to keep us all safe from the terrorists. It won’t be long before they’ll use this as the political sales pitch against net neutrality. Its supporters are actually enabling the ‘Terrorists’ and hate America and ‘Freedom’.

I like the term ‘groundbreaking’. There is nothing ‘groundbreaking’ about this. The KGB, the Stasi, the Mukhabarat and countless others have been using these techniques since the technology was invented.

For black comic (un)relief, there is this line about the Democrats, many of which still can’t seem to call balls and strikes, even when the pitch is right down the middle (or when they are getting beaned by them)…

There is a divide among Capitol Hill’s majority Democrats about whether the companies deserve any protection. Some believe they were operating in good faith, on orders that appeared to be lawful. Others believe lawyers at the companies had a responsibility to ensure the requests weren’t an abuse of presidential power.

This would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

Read The Complete Article from The New York Times