Nice to see that others are coming to the same conclusion, after considering all the facts, that telecoms don’t deserve any immunity (retroactive or otherwise) in regards to their illegal wiretapping activities.

Classified documents and testimony about the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program show that it’s not necessary to grant retroactive immunity to telephone companies accused of unlawfully opening their networks to government spies, key congressional Democrats said on Wednesday. In a five-page statement (PDF), U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers and 18 Democrats on that panel contended the Bush administration has “not established a valid and credible case justifying the extraordinary action of Congress enacting blanket retroactive immunity.” Skepticism about the Bush administration’s once-secret eavesdropping program is nothing new for the Democrats who signed onto the statement. The key difference here is that they say their latest conclusions are based on a series of classified reports and briefings to which many of them only recently had access. “Our review of classified documents has reinforced serious concerns about the potential illegality of the administration’s actions in authorizing and carrying out its warrantless surveillance program,” they wrote.

Now que Dubya squawking on about how we’re less safe because he can’t pardon AT&T and others from breaking the law and ignoring our constitutional rights. Big Business meet Big Brother.

Here’s a good Slashdot story: “A judge in Rochester, New York, has denied an RIAA application for default judgment on the ground that the RIAA’s evidence was insufficient, in that it contained no details of actual downloads or distributions, and no sufficient evidence that defendant was in fact Kazaa user ‘heavyjeffmc@KaZaA.’ The decision concluded that ‘there are significant issues of fact regarding the identification of the defendant from his alleged “online media distribution system” username.’ (In case you’re unfamiliar with the term ‘online media distribution system,’ that’s because it is a term the RIAA coined 4 years ago to describe p2p file sharing accounts in its lawsuits; the term is not known to have been used by anyone else anywhere else.)” So while an IP isn’t good enough to nail down a ‘downloader’ (or in this case someone who used Kazaa, for what we don’t know), here a judge decides that a user name (which anyone can make up) doesn’t truly represent a certain person.