The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, ordinarily the source of quality thinking, has produced an embarrassingly bad paper called Don’t Shoot the Messenger: Telecommunications Carriers Deserve Immunity for facilitating illegal wiretapping and surveillance.
Here’s a sampling of the kind of reasoning that pegged my b.s. detector:
[I]n its legislation to overhaul the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), Congress is poised to condone lawsuits against telecommunications carriers for complying with what they thought was a legal information-sharing program that was approved by the highest levels of government.
The author has inverted the debate – “if Congress does nothing it condones lawsuits.” No, in fact, if Congress does nothing, it does nothing. What it is considering doing is condoning illegal wiretapping and surveillance.
The question whether any program was approved by the highest levels of government is perfectly irrelevant unless that approval came from the judicial branch, which it did not. The inference is that someone in the executive branch can approve programs regardless of what the law is. This is flatly wrong.
On the question of whether the telecommunications companies thought this was a legal program, the presumed facts are not in evidence. That is one of the issues in the lawsuits. It will help set the damages if the participating telecom firms did think they were legally in the right and turned out to be wrong.
So bad is the legal reasoning in this paper that I think the author should lose her law license. Turns out, she doesn’t have one. It shows. ITIF brings discredit on itself publishing this dreck.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.