This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, December 31st, 2007.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The US Senate has punted on reforming the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The Senate will also wait until 2008 to decide if

telecoms should get legal protections after they gave the government private data about

their customers. Cato Institute adjunct scholar Tim Lee says giving immunity to telecoms is

another step on a slippery slope. The real debate is about whether the question is is to what extent there needs to be judicial oversight over

government surveillance of domestic communications infrastructure.

And last August, Congress passed some legislation just before they went for

their August recess that gave the administration the Bush administration

broad latitude to to require telephone companies to and other telecommunications companies to

eavesdrop on

on calls between domestic

individuals and people overseas

and that legislation I think was very troubling from a civil liberties

perspective but there were two very important positive things to it.

First it sunset it after six months and second it did not include one of the

provisions the Bush administration has been pushing very hard for which is

retroactive legal immunity for past law breaking by telephone companies and other telecom companies like AT&T of Verizon.

They essentially these telecoms are accused of cooperating with government requests for data about those

telecoms customers, right? That's right. There are several lawsuits across the

country that have been filed against AT&T and Verizon alleging that they have provided

...