I find it amazing that people would make an argument like this with a straight face:

Brian Darling, director of Senate relations at the conservative Heritage Foundation, told Cybercast News Service that he expects “the White House will threaten to veto this.”

“Some elements are problematic for anti-terrorism,” he said, particularly the lack of a provision that would grant retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that provided information to the government and may have done so illegally.

“It should be retroactive,” said Darling. “These companies are getting sued because they were trying to be helpful … to hunt down people who are abusing our telecommunications system to carry out acts in the United States.”

This sounds like a marvelous legal principle: firms can ignore the law and compromise their customers’ civil liberties with impunity, as long as they were “trying to be helpful.” Come to think of it, why do we need warrants at all? Instead, let’s just have the FBI and the NSA issue “certificates of helpfulness” in exchange for their customers’ private information. I mean, the nice man from the NSA would never ask for information he wasn’t allowed to have, would he?

Helpful

Originally from The Technology Liberation Front by Tim Lee