On Wednesday, Chief Judge Vaughn Walker of Federal District Court in Northern California threw out more than three dozen lawsuits claiming that the nation's major telecommunications companies had illegally assisted in the wiretapping without warrants program approved by President George W. Bush after the 2001 terrorist attacks. Judge Walker said that although consumer and privacy groups raised important constitutional issues in their claims, Congress had left no doubt about its "unequivocal intention" when it passed a measure last summer giving immunity to phone carriers in the wiretapping program. The ruling represents a major victory not only for AT&T and other carriers, which faced potential damages of billions of dollars if they lost the cases, but also for intelligence officials in Washington who had fought assertively in their defense. Officials from both the Bush and the Obama administrations maintained that the cooperation of the phone companies has been vital to national security and that penalizing them for their participation would jeopardize important surveillance operations.
