So I know the blog is called 60secondscience.com, but you should spare 120 seconds for this bad boy. Senator Chris Dodd's staff put together an interview with AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein. Klein is now in Washington to lobby against granting retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies for tapping our phones.
A provision in the FISA bill, up for vote today, would grant immunity from ongoing lawsuits for activities between 2001 and 2006 because the telecom companies didn't know any better. The bill already passed the Intelligence committee headed by Senator Rockefeller, who, coincidentally, has seen a surge in telecommunications donations to his campaign war chest.
For a more detailed back story, you can read Klein's initial exposure (PDF) on finding a secret room in an AT&T building that was only accessible to people with NSA clearance.
In related ironews (That's "irony"+"news" for those who can't follow my pronunciation), the families of two Chinese dissidents who were jailed after Yahoo handed information to the government are speaking out. Congress grilled Yahoo on the issue on Tuesday and is very upset that telecommunications companies are helping other countries spy on their citizens. In October, Congress passed the Global Online Freedom Act to penalize U.S. companies up to $2 million for cooperating with censors abroad.
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