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Phone companies shield may be added to security bill

By Susan Cornwell

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A provision that would shield telephone companies from liability for providing call records to help the U.S. government track terrorists may be added to a port security bill, U.S. Senate sources told Reuters on Friday.

Lawmakers were rushing to finish legislation to boost security at American seaports before going home this weekend to campaign for November congressional elections. The House and Senate had a tentative agreement on the port safety provisions, but the bill was attracting last-minute amendments.

Republican sources said Alaskan Sen. Ted Stevens was considering adding liability protections for phone companies that assist with President George W. Bush's warrantless domestic spying program, called the Terrorist Surveillance Program.

Stevens, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, is one of the senators from the Republican majority working on the text of the compromise House-Senate port security bill.

Some Democratic senators and their aides said they had not seen a text of the ports measure, and were opposed to the idea of a telephone company liability shield.

"Typically I am against those kinds of shields, that kind of immunity. The place to find out is in the courtroom," said Sen. Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, who was among Democratic negotiators assigned to the port security bill.

"I've heard that is a possibility," Lautenberg said of the telephone liability shield, "but I have no proof of these things." He complained Republicans had not provided "a piece of paper" to Democrats outlining the compromise ports bill.

Shortly after the September 11 attacks, Bush secretly ordered the National Security Agency (NSA) to monitor the international telephone conversations and e-mails of U.S. citizens without court warrants while in pursuit of suspected terrorists.

USA Today newspaper reported in May that AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth Corp. gave the NSA access to customer records so it could secretly analyze calling patterns to detect terrorist plots. This provoked a host of lawsuits and objections from privacy advocates.

In June, the newspaper said some lawmakers had confirmed that AT&T participated in the domestic spying program. But the newspaper retreated from its earlier report that BellSouth and Verizon were also involved.

A federal judge last month declared the NSA program unconstitutional. Bush appealed, and while the case continues, Congress is trying to weigh in. Continued ...

Source: www.hotnewsbox.com

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