Ms Mikulski

In light of new revelations about the telecoms motivations, will you withdraw your support for amnesty. In a speech on the Senate floor you proclaimed that the telecoms companies broke the law for patriotic reasons. It is not Patriotic to cut off criminal investigations for a few thousand dollars. Some of these were FISA wire taps. Not very patriotic of the telecoms.

A Justice Department audit released Thursday blamed the lost connections on the FBI's lax oversight of money used in undercover investigations. In one office alone, unpaid costs for wiretaps from one phone company totaled $66,000.

In at least one case, a wiretap used in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act investigation ''was halted due to untimely payment,'' the audit found. FISA wiretaps are used in the government's most sensitive and secretive criminal and intelligence investigations, and allow eavesdropping on suspected terrorists or spies.

These companies started way before September 11, 2001. They involve domestic spying, and have nothing to due with keeping Americans safer.

They told us it was all about stopping terrorism. But now we've learned that the NSA's massive wiretapping and data collection program started long before 9/11 - in fact, it started in the 1990s - and was ramped up by this administration immediately after President Bush took office. The NSA also routinely collects phone records for run-of-the-mill drug cases that have nothing to do with terrorism.

• They told us they weren't targeting domestic conversations. But now we find out that the taps weren't focused on foreigners or even international calls. The Times reveals that part of what made telecom Qwest balk at a request for data in early 2001 was that the program was designed to pick up significant amounts of purely domestic communications by granting the NSA access "to their most localized communications switches, which primarily carry domestic calls," and that only "limited international traffic also passes through the switches."

• They told us they were gathering just the data they absolutely needed to fight terrorism. But now we know that this is not a program narrowly targeted at terrorists. Their repeated assurances that the government doesn't conduct vast dragnet operations just aren't true. As The Times reported, "The NSA met with AT&T officials to discuss replicating a Bedminster, N.J., network center here in Maryland to give the agency access to all the global phone and e-mail traffic that ran through it."

Please help keep us safe from the Bush administration. It is important you not help set president in giving blanket amnesty to the telecoms. Congress has never done it. Please, vote against telecoms amnesty.