Maine Owl

The full August 30, 2007 interview I did with Maine Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Shenna Bellows for WERU Community Radio is downloadable from peacecast.us HERE. That link will provide a great deal of supporting information as well.

An interesting part of the federal snooping case (Hepting v. AT & T) that would be squelched if Congress grants immunity to the telecommunications companies is a complaint from Maine concerning Verizon phone records. A complete explanation of the Maine portion of the case from an interview I did with Shenna Bellows, along with a recent update from a good January 22 report on Maine Public Broadcasting, are in this 9-1/2-minute AUDIO FILE. LISTEN HERE:



The MPBN piece reports very interesting written statements from Republican Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, along with a pleasantly contrasting one from Democratic First District Representative Tom Allen.

Collins, according to a statement read by MPBN's Barbara Cariddi, "supports the immunity provision." Cariddi quotes Collins:

"As a matter of fundamental fairness, companies that relied in good faith on the legal assurances of the Attorney General should not now be subjected to lawsuits based on the assistance they provide to our nation's intelligence efforts." The bill, "strikes the right balance of civil liberties and security."

The Portland Press Herald ran an article with approximately the same statement, adding that Collins feels that "right balance" includes "protecting Americans' civil liberties while not impeding the ability of our intelligence community to monitor the communications of foreign terrorists overseas."

Representative Allen, who is running a campaign to unseat Collins, has a very different view. Cariddi reported that Allen,

opposes the retroactive immunity provision, because in his words, "neither the government nor large telecommunications corporations are above the law."

Good, Tom. This is not about "striking balance." It's about officials and corporations violating black-letter law, then expecting absolution from Congress. They think they get to do anything they want to whoever they want just by uttering the magic words "national security." The arguments about why Collins (along with Democratic collaborators like Harry Reid and Jay Rockefeller) is dishonest and Tom Allen is right fill Glenn Greenwald's blog nearly every day, like in his piece today.

Finally, I want to give Maine Attorney General Steve Rowe credit for asking Snowe and Collins in a letter to oppose immunity because it would hamper the Maine PUC's investigation into Verizon. Makes me glad I made the right decision back in 1992 to support Steve's first campaign for Legislature.

Here's why a state AG can be a lot worse. Consider Rhode Island. Below the fold is more on telco immunity from Rhode Island today.

ACLU: Lynch caves in to feds on phone privacy
Friday, January 25, 2008 - By Bruce Landis - Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE — Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch is under fire from the American Civil Liberties Union for supporting immunity for the telephone companies accused of illegally turning over the telephone records of millions of Americans, including Rhode Islanders, to a federal intelligence agency.

Steven Brown, executive director of the ACLU's Rhode Island affiliate, said that by supporting a White House-backed immunity bill, Lynch has decided "that the interests of the telecommunications industry are more important than the privacy rights of our residents."

The ACLU produced a copy of a Dec. 11 letter supporting the legislation signed by Lynch and 20 other state attorneys general and addressed to the Democratic leadership in the U.S. Senate. The letter said that protecting the telephone companies from lawsuits "is essential to domestic and national security."

Lynch didn’t respond to a number of questions submitted by The Journal, instead issuing a statement in which he charged that holding the telecommunications companies responsible for giving records to the National Security Agency would cause them to stop cooperating with local police in criminal cases.

Lynch posed a hypothetical scenario where, in the middle of a life-or-death investigation, the telephone companies stopped cooperating for fear of being sued and "a tragedy" resulted.

Lynch also said that lack of immunity for the telephone companies would undermine national anti-terrorism efforts, saying that the companies “will stop cooperating” with the intelligence agencies if they could be sued as a result.

On the other hand, the attorneys general of Vermont, Maine and New Jersey, and the Missouri public safety commissioner have urged the Senate to reject immunity for the telephone companies.

...

Thank you Steve Rowe. We're really glad to have you.

See also: HERE and HERE at Turn Maine Blue.