Immunizing Stasi collaborators
By Thoreau
Yesterday, on a tour of Sauron’s optometrist, Bush called for the East Germany Restoration Act to be extended. He also called for lawsuit protection for companies collaborating in warrantless spying on their fellow citizens, in the event that these activities are found to be illegal.
Like Jim predicted (sorry, can’t find the link right now), they are in the process of getting immunity for all of the crimes committed in the past 7 years. From the lowliest Stasi collaborator scum, all the way to the man of wealth and taste in the Naval observatory, he wants a blanket declaration that nobody is in trouble for any of these crimes.
What confuses me is the idea of a law saying you can’t be sued if you break the law. How does that work? Can a law say that something is still a crime but you can’t be held responsible for it?
Sadly, I predict that the Democrats will roll over. Yes, I know, there were some tough statements by Democrats in that article. If tough statements by Democrats in newspaper articles actually meant something our troops would be home by now, Bush would be in an orange jumpsuit, and the torture chambers would be dismantled.
Comment by Timothy —
September 20, 2007 @ 9:23 am
Sadly, I think you’re right, Thoreau. There’s little that leads me to believe the “opposition” party wants to limit the scope of executive authority. I honestly think they’re just waiting to get their hand into the cookie jar too. They’re fundamentally uninterested in reining in government power, because they want it for themselves. They’re Boromir, but without the last minute redemption.
Comment by Mithras —
September 20, 2007 @ 9:34 am
Can a law say that something is still a crime but you can’t be held responsible for it?
Of course. For example, if evidence of a crime is found to exist, but the statute of limitations has run, a crime has been committed but the law has no punishment for it. In the civil context, laws sometimes immunize certain people from certain kinds of lawsuits. For example, police officers are usually immune individually from lawsuits for their actions carrying out an unconstitutional policy of their department.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
September 20, 2007 @ 10:10 am
I dunno about one point – when we’ve got the current administration leaning on telcos and banks and using everything fair and foul up to national security letters to get them to cooperate, the idea that someone or some company could get sued for submitting to an out-of-control executive branch seems a bit unfair.
Comment by Phillip J. Birmingham —
September 20, 2007 @ 10:50 am
It may seem unfair, but given the pressure they’re under to do the wrong thing, any additional pressure to do what’s right seems like something we shouldn’t give up.
Comment by Jennifer —
September 20, 2007 @ 11:08 am
the idea that someone or some company could get sued for submitting to an out-of-control executive branch seems a bit unfair.
True, but the solution is not to make “I was just following orders” a valid defense.
Comment by Barry —
September 20, 2007 @ 1:46 pm
And to make sure that the companies have incentives to not cooperate. You think that some of these companies aren’t looking for convenient deals? After all, highly-secret information collection is probably followed by highly-secret information dissemination. Think of NSA as the ultimate marketing research/competitive intelligence firm.
In addition, my assumption is that many of these companies have eagerly supported the GOP and Bush, because there’s lots of goodies in it for them. If they can get immunity for the crimes, then that just takes us one step deeper into fascism:
Mussolini: “The Fascist State lays claim to rule in the economic field no less than in others; it makes its action felt throughout the length and breadth of the country by means of its corporate, social, and educational institutions, and all the political, economic, and spiritual forces of the nation, organised in their respective associations, circulate within the State.”
Comment by Eric the .5b —
September 21, 2007 @ 9:26 am
Apples and oranges, if admittedly both fruit. For regular citizens, doing what agents of the government tell you to do, especially if they’re hinting that you have a nice business here and that it’d be a shame if anything happened to it, is a little more defensible.
Comment by KCinDC —
September 21, 2007 @ 12:34 pm
Giant telecommunications companies are not “regular citizens”, Eric, and surely have a lot more ability to stand up to agents of the government than low-level members of the military do.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
September 21, 2007 @ 1:58 pm
Short of lives being involved, the more you have, the more you have to lose, KC. A soldier has a sworn duty to refuse illegal orders. Private citizens working for a company don’t have a sworn duty to go to the mattresses to thwart (and resist the reprisals from for however long) a government leaning on them.
Comment by Gary Farber —
September 21, 2007 @ 5:38 pm
“Yesterday, on a tour of Sauron’s optometrist, Bush called for the East Germany Restoration Act to be extended.”
I don’t want to make an issue of this, here, where you have a perfectly fine point, but I’m pushed to say that I think this sort of games-playing with language, where we recode stuff into what’s fun and persuasive to us, tends to not work well in the end.
My own response tends to be to not come around to a site doing that for a time, and then I have no idea what the local code is.
Fine for a variety of reasons, but I tend to get a bit unnerved by local codes.
Metaphor is great, but not as a substitute for what-was-that-against-exactly?
(Short version, that was my first response to reading that, and wondering I needed to look up a chart of past language/usages.)
Comment by Gary Farber —
September 21, 2007 @ 5:39 pm
That is, a lot of folks have a tendency to feel pleased after inventing local metaphors and codes, and that’s perfectly unerstandable, and probably a fairly bad idea.