Your Service Provider is No More Your Friend Than Your President Is

http://www.truthout.org/article/democrats-legalize-bushs-crimes

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claims that a key positive feature of the new wiretap "compromise" is that the bill reaffirms that the President must follow the law, even though the same bill virtually assures that no one will be held accountable for George W. Bush's violation of the earlier spying law.

So you heard about the new wiretap law passed by congress, right? Basically it lets the Bush administration get away with all the taps that they have already made, allows them to do more in the future, and does not hold internet/telecom service providers accountable for complying with wire taps
Beyond the breathtaking scope of this new authority, the Bush administration also snuck in a clause that granted forward-looking immunity from lawsuits to communications service providers that assisted the spying.
That removed one of the few safeguards against Bush's warrantless wiretaps: the concern among service providers that they might be sued by customers for handing over constitutionally protected information without a warrant.
So basically it’s gov. AND telecom/internet providers teaming up against our freedoms.

In short, the "Protect America Act" made warrantless surveillance legally cost free for a collaborating service provider, tilting the scales even further in favor of the government's spying powers.
And we let it happen. I am among this “we” as I received 3 different emails from public outcry organizations and I just let them go. But now that I see the aftermath I am almost shocked. This was a great erosion of our freedoms of both privacy and ability to air grievances in court.
I wonder how the service providers will act now that they know they have a green light for spying and the protection of the government. Now they too are above the law and we are at the mercy.
You think this doesn’t include you? This law applies not just to terror suspects abroad who might communicate with Americans, but to anyone who is "reasonably believed to be outside the United States" and who might possess "foreign intelligence information," defined as anything that could be useful to U.S. foreign policy.
That means that almost any American engaged in international commerce or dealing with foreign issues - say, a businessman in touch with a foreign subsidiary or a U.S. reporter sending an overseas story back to his newspaper - is vulnerable to warrantless intercepts approved on the say-so of two Bush subordinates, the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence. Will this include overseas internet transactions? EBay? Chat lines and message boards? Where do you fit in all of this?
We lost something here. Sadly, we won’t really know what we lost until it is personally used against us. I may have to reconsider that anti-Israeli post I was going to blog about. It may be read by someone in Damascus. If you don’t hear from me for a while you’ll know why. Don’t ask any questions though or you’ll be joining me, wherever I happen to be held.