Federal Intelligence and Surveillance Act

Senator Dodd was successful in postponing until January a debate over whether telecommunications companies such as AT&T should be given retroactive immunity for aiding and abetting the Bush administration in their warrantless wiretapping efforts.

This from Wired.com :

The presidential candidate threatened to filibuster and hold the Senate floor if the Senate shot down his amendment to strip immunity from the bill. That threat moved Reid to postpone a vote on the bill, so that the Senate could take up war funding bills, a massive domestic spending bill and changes to the Alternative Minimum Tax before the winter break.

[...]

Dodd spent nearly 10 hours on the Senate floor Monday, assaulting the administration's secret warrantless wiretapping program and channeling Senator Frank Church, whose investigation in the 1970s of the nation's intelligence services clandestine led to Congressional limits on government spying.

The fight is obviously not over, but at least with this stay of constitutional execution, civil liberties activists (and ... ahem ... netizens) will be able to spread the word even louder to their neighbors about how their phone and cable companies are spying on them.

See more at The Electronic Frontier Foundation.