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The accompanying claim that companies should never "second-guess" the "judgment of the President regarding what's legal" -- which I just heard from John Cornyn and Saxby Chambliss -- is equally creepy, and is the crux of the authoritarian case for telecom immunity.
Hear, hear. In some circumstances, we even expect soldiers to second-guess their commanders when their orders are illegal. That after all is the precedent of Nuremberg. So why can we not expect civilians to sometimes second-guess the requests of the government? Reasonable deference to the expressed legal judgments of the administration is appropriate. But we should not let private actors off the hook no matter what they did just because as the government paid them it also said, wink wink, this is all legal.
