sued on behalf of AT&T customers. An earlier, ongoing suit (Hepting v. AT&T) by the EFF bogged down over the recent FISA changes. On January 23, 2009, the Obama administration adopted the same position as its predecessor when it urged Judge Walker to set aside a ruling in Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation et al. v. Obama, et al. The Obama administration sided with the Bush administration in its legal defense of July 2008 legislation that immunized the nation's telecommunications companies from lawsuits accusing them of complicity in the program, according to Attorney General Eric Holder. On March 31, 2010, Judge Walker ruled that the program was illegal when it intercepted phone calls of Al Haramain. Declaring that the plaintiffs had been "subjected to unlawful surveillance", the judge said the government was liable for damages. In 2012, the Ninth Circuit vacated the judgment against the United States and affirmed the district court's dismissal of the claim. Proposed FISA amendments Several commentators raised the issue of whether FISA needed to be amended to address foreign intelligence needs, technology developments and advanced technical intelligence gathering. The intent was to provide programmatic approvals of surveillance of foreign terrorist communications, so that they could then legally be used as evidence for FISA warrants. Fixing Surveillance; Why We Listen, The Eavesdropping Debate We Should be Having; A New Surveillance Act; A historical solution to the Bush spying issue, Whispering Wires and Warrantless Wiretaps address FISA's inadequacies in the post-9/11 context. The Bush administration contended that amendment was unnecessary because they claimed that the President had inherent authority to approve the NSA program, and that the process of amending FISA might require disclosure of classified information that could harm national security. In response, Senator Leahy said, "If you do not even attempt to persuade Congress to amend the law, you must abide by the law as written." President Bush claimed that the law did not apply because the Constitution gave him "inherent authority" to act. Some politicians and commentators used "difficult, if not impossible" to argue that the administration believed Congress would have rejected an amendment. In his written "Responses to Questions from Senator Specter" in which Specter specifically asked why the administration had not sought to amend FISA, Gonzales wrote: Competing legislative proposals to authorize the NSA program subject to Congressional or FISC oversight were the subject of Congressional hearings. On March 16, 2006, Senators Mike DeWine,