While the libertarians among us might have hoped that Congress would have had the backbone needed to hold telecoms accountable through the courts for their spying on Americans without court orders the fact is Congress didn’t. The pessimists among us though never believed for a second that Congress wouldn’t toe the line and grant amnesty to the telecoms.

As it turns out not only have they granted amnesty; which basically halts any lawsuits in the courts at this time, they have also expanded the spying powers granted to agencies like the NSA who use the telecoms to carry out their spy programs. As Ryan Singel from Threat Level writes in a post today

The bill allows the NSA to order phone companies, ISPs, and online service providers to turn over all communications that have one foreigner as a party to the conversation. If any Americans are party to the conversation, the government is supposed to mask their names, but these minimization procedures are easily overridden. The longstanding Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act required specific court orders to wiretap phone and internet lines inside the United States, but did not regulate spying conducted on non-U.S. soil.

Under the so-called FISA Amendments Act of 2008,  the government would need court order to wiretap an American overseas, regardless of where the tap was. Under the current regime, targeted taps aimed at Americans overseas requires the sign-off of the Attorney General.

In addition Michael Masnick from Techdirt adds

However, under this new law, Congress has basically given the President (who ordered the wiretaps in the first place, and doesn’t want these trials to go forward since they may reveal that he broke the law too) "get out of jail free" cards he can hand to each telco, saying that since he told them that the wiretaps were legal, the lawsuits no longer can proceed. Basically, this puts the President above the law, lets him avoid trials that might prove that his activities broke the law and to reward telcos who broke the law at his command.

Even worse, the bill basically grants the administration the right to keep on spying without getting warrants. Intelligence agencies will be able to demand various communications providers hand over communications without court approval and without naming the target, so long as they claim that the communications are "reasonably believed to involve a non-American who is outside the country." Seems rather wide open for abuse doesn’t it?

So while we argue about the merits of social media, comment fragmentation and all those other wonderful warm and fuzzy precepts upon we dream of a new world of openness and transparency, it is being made a joke of by the real power in our society. The power that comes from controlling the money and access to information.

It is things like this that in effect make a joke out a free and equal society that is the underlying tenet for much of what Web 2.0 and its advocates stand for. We can stand on our electronic pulpits or type our 140 characters espousing social change and involvement by all when in fact the very politicians we claim to believe in this social media change end up showing their true colors.

When things like this happen here in the US and then in Canada we see the obvious uprising by the people against a law heavily influenced by foreign interests being ignored by those in power this shows exactly how little effect things like social media really has. IT shows how much of a dream world we are living in.