This e-mail is right now a half a day old, and as such I do not know if it's still relevant
Just did a quick search, added the story at the bottom. The vote still seems to have not yet happened.



Last month, you took action and the Senate Judiciary Committee passed a bill that did not include retroactive immunity. Immunity would let telecommunication companies who broke the law helping the Bush Administration spy on Americans off the hook.

Now, Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic Majority Leader, is using procedural tricks to make your work irrelevant by bringing the Intelligence Committee's version of the same bill to the Senate floor instead. What's the big difference? This version of the bill includes retroactive immunity for telecommunication companies.

Wait! That's not all. Even this bill can be stopped if Senator Reid just respects the hold Senator Chris Dodd has placed on the bill.

However, media reports indicate that Senator Reid will not honor Senator Dodd's hold. That's where we come in, and we have to act fast. The vote could happen in the next several hours. Please pick up your phone right now and call Senator Reid:

Senator Harry Reid
202-224-3542

Please report how your call went here:
http://www.DemocracyforAmerica.com/FISAaction

Here's the suggested message:

"I'm calling to ask Senator Reid to honor Senator Dodd's hold on the Intelligence Committee's FISA reform bill.

I do not support any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunication companies who helped the Bush Administration spy on Americans. I'm counting on Senator Reid to stand up to President Bush and for the Constitution."

We don't have much time. If we work quickly, we might be able to stop this bill. Please take a few minutes right now.

Thank you for everything you do.

Charles Chamberlain
Political Director

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071...orted-bill.html


Battle over domestic wiretap legislation to begin in earnest as Reid backs Administration-supported bill
By Julian Sanchez | Published: December 14, 2007 - 02:39PM CT

The battle in the Senate over how to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) begins on Monday when, over the objections of prominent Democrats, Majority Leader Harry Reid will introduce the White House–supported version of a reform bill approved in October by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

This past Tuesday, fourteen Democratic senators—including presidential contenders Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joseph Biden, and Chris Dodd—signed a letter urging Reid to instead bring to the floor an alternative bill produced in November by the Judiciary Committee. That version of the legislation, which will now be offered as an amendment to the Intelligence Committee's bill, contained a variety of additional restrictions and checks on government wiretaps sought by civil liberties groups. It also, crucially, omitted a provision granting telecom companies retroactive immunity from lawsuits related to their cooperation with the president's extrajudicial eavesdropping program. President Bush has pledged to veto any FISA amendment that failed to provide such immunity—a threat that did not deter the House from passing just such a bill last month. Meanwhile, Senator Dodd, whose attempt to place a "hold" on the Intelligence Committee bill was overridden by Reid, is pledging to filibuster any legislation that does include retroactive immunity.

While Democrats have struggled to counteract a frustrated base's perception of congressional capitulation to the White House, the executive branch has mounted a full court press in favor of its preferred version of the law. In a Los Angeles Times op-ed on Wednesday, Attorney General Michael Mukasey warned that the changes made in the Judiciary Committee's version of the bill "would have the collective effect of weakening the government's ability to effectively surveil intelligence targets abroad." And on Thursday, Mukasey and Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell made their case directly to the Senate in a closed-door briefing.

With divisions sharp, various attempts to split the difference between the alternatives have fallen flat. Reid had earlier sought, under the Senate's Rule Fourteen, to offer a pair of his own bills mixing and matching provisions from the two committees, a solution that appears to have pleased nobody. And on Thursday, the Judiciary Committee rejected a proposal by Senator Arlen Spector to allow lawsuits against the telecom companies to go forward, but with the government substituted as the defendant. (The groups bringing the suits worry that the government would be able to invoke legal defenses, such as executive privilege and sovereign immunity, that are unavailable to private telecom providers.) Michelle Richardson, a legislative consultant for the American Civil Liberties Union, hopes that this may be a strategic blunder on the administration's part. "A lot of people would probably support giving the government broader authority if they would decouple that issue from the immunity question," says Richardson, "so they're probably shooting themselves in the foot by forcing it to go forward like this."

The current wrangling continues a debate that began this summer with the hasty passage of the Protect America Act in response to a ruling by the FISA court—a ruling which the court has declined to release, but which is purported to have required intelligence agencies to acquire warrants when wiretapping conversations between foreign parties that were routed (and recorded) through US telecom switches. Eavesdropping on purely foreign communications had previously been unrestricted—primarily because, traditionally, the physical tap on foreign-to-foreign calls had occurred overseas, outside US jurisdiction. But the Protect America Act, which is due to expire in February, went beyond merely closing this "intelligence gap" and authorized a broad program of surveillance, under minimal court oversight, that permits Americans' conversations with foreigners to be collected, so long as the American party to the communication was not "targeted" by an investigation. The bills now under consideration seek to establish a more permanent solution: the Intelligence Committee version of the FISA Amendment would remain in effect for six years, while the Judiciary Committee version sunsets in four.

While media attention has focused largely on the question of immunity for telecom firms, the additional limitations on surveillance contained in the Judiciary Committee's version of the bill are, arguably, at least as significant. That bill would explicitly bar "bulk" or "vacuum cleaner" surveillance of international telecom traffic that is not directed at a particular person or telephone number. It would require individualized FISA court review whenever the collection of an American's communications became a "significant purpose" of an investigation, whether or not that person was a "target" of the investigation. And it would provide for a congressional audit of past extrajudicial surveillance by the National Security Agency.

A spokesman for Reid says the majority leader hopes to be able to send a bill to conference before Congress adjourns for winter recess, though some observers find this unlikely, and civil liberties groups are anxious to avoid a repetition of the sort of last-minute legislation that produced the Protect America Act. Meanwhile, some civil libertarians are already casting an eye toward the next battle. "We're going to keep fighting to get the important judicial protections in, the immunity out, but if we can't do those things we're going to get as many no votes on the final product as possible," says the ACLU's Richardson. "We don't want the members owning this bill, owning this program, so that when it finally does sunset we can get meaningful changes."

Those of you who subscribe to the quarterly knew to expect this. The last issue had a column called "Dems to watch". Harry Reid was one of them. I pointed out that he'd accepted $22,000 from AT&T and that it was likely to result in the topic of this very thread.

You can read the .pdf version here:
http://www.oldamericancentury.org/fall_2007(2).pdf

If you aren't already subscribed, you can do so here:
http://www.oldamericancentury.org/newsletter_subscribe.htm

Warning: The quarterly newsletter is very expensive!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 2 dollars a month.

BTW, I'm starting on the next issue and hope to send it out in a week or two. (Which means about one month)