Background: this summer Congress passed the Protect America Act, which was more or less Patriot Act III and gave up almost all oversight on wiretapping. The Democrats did their “oh no people will think we’re soft on terror” thing again and totally caved on this, with the excuse that they’d try to fix it later. The current bill, “RESTORE”, was supposed to be the fix, but under heavy lobbying from the telecoms (and presumably the White House) they snuck in this immunity deal. The Democrats are waffling again, and Feinstein (CA) and Schumer (NY) are two of the committee members who could block the bill, but they don’t have a good track record of doing the right thing without massive support. Sen. Dodd is promising to filibuster if it gets out of committee, but the party isn’t really backing him up (so that’s another thing to call your senator about, no matter where you are).
This is one of those things I point to when people say “Oh they’ve just always spied on everyone anyway, what’s the difference”: if this weren’t different, if the government didn’t think they could get in trouble for this stuff, they wouldn’t have bothered with all these legal maneuvers. This is worth pushing on.
p.s. I’ve called Feinstein’s office a few times on different things and it’s always kind of entertaining, in a sad way. Her staffers are all very nice and sound very young, they all sound a little apologetic (“Umm yes, we’ve been getting a lot of calls about that”) and they never seem to have any idea what her positions are on anything. But if they bother to count anything, it’s phone calls from constituents; E-mail definitely goes straight into the abyss.