Ok, try to imagine the flip side of this. You run a large telecommunication company that tracks what communications go where for accounting purposes (i.e. that’s how you bill people). On 9/11/01, Terrorists hijack airplanes and manage to kill thousands of Americans within a few hours. The Government comes to your company and asks if they may have a record of foreign calls over time period X, so they might be able to “connect the dots”, possibly averting another attack and saving thousands of lives. You:

A) Refuse, thereby keeping your company from being sued into bankruptcy. If there are any more attacks, hopefully they are not using your product or the victims will sue you too.
B) Agree, but only if the Government produces a subpoena for each and every one of the millions of records they are requesting. (all signed in triplicate)
C) Refuse and immediately go public with a full page ad in the New York Times, detailing how the Government is attempting to get international phone records from your company, and decrying this prying into the privacy between your customers and whatever suspicious character they were calling in the Middle East.
D) Quietly accede to the request, depending on the assurances of the Government that the request is legal, and keeping it from becoming public, and therefore keeping the Terrorists from knowing they are being tracked. Until it is too late for them.

This is not funny. This is serious. The Government has been opening foreign mail since the days of Ben Franklin in order to keep our people safe. You can yell and scream about it all you want, but I am quite happy that the phone companies in question complied with the Governments request to help track terrorism suspects, and also quite happy that the Congress has (finally) seen fit to immunize them against the horde of screaming trial lawyers demanding their blood.

The Dems expect us to take them seriously on the subject of National Security. That’s funny.