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No Immunity

The Congress and the President may not like the law, but they can’t just strip our rights. Our rights have existed from the dawn of time and will persist until the last of us is garbage-collected from a post-human’s hyperfluidic memory banks.

The latest in the war on privacy is the attempt by the President and Congress to collude on an update to FISA that includes a provision intended to grant immunity from civil suits against telecommunications companies for the part they may have played in illegal wiretaps.

While in a perfect world such an idiotic attempt to stifle a basic right of redress for violation of rights would not occur, this is not a perfect world. On the other hand, and indeed more importantly, rest assured that this provision is in fact nude. Amendment Four makes that undeniably clear in its language: shall not be violated.

No mention of convenience to the executive or other such weasling applies. Amendment Four is an intrepid piece of law that must persist if a union is to exist at all. One merely wishes that the so-called legislators of this nation and the so-called executive of the government might occasion themselves to understand the law rather than limiting themselves to defecating in it while grinning like a three-month-old who has soiled himself immediately after a fresh change.