The NSA Wiretap Ad
Posted on November 3, 2006
Allah Pundit says the ad is misleading.
Here’s a phrase they might want to include in the next iteration: without a warrant.
Ace seems to be having fun disagreeing with Allah Pundit.
For the record, I agree with Ace on this one. The ACLU has been using this “warrant” argument to undermind the NSA program since the NY Times leaked the info on it. Ace explains it well.
A conventional warrant allows one to listen going forward. You don’t have a recording of any conversations before the warrant; only after.
But this isn’t a normal domestic law-enforcement tap. This is worldwide indiscriminate collection of signals data. We’re collecting everything we can.
And it’s only once we have reason to believe a certain public phone in Cairo is being used to send orders to a terrorist cell that we actually listen to the recorded calls.
If Bush is required to get a warrant for this sort of intelligence — note, not law-enforcement, intelligence — collection of information, he can only get conversations “going forward” from the time of the authorization.
He can’t, as he can now, I believe, sift back into previous captures and listen in on what newly identified terrorist suspects have been saying for, say, the past two years.
The NSA has always been doing this, more or less. Capturing everything it could; it’s just been able to capture and store more as computer memory has become so cheap, and we’ve put satellites and listening posts every damn where we could.
The new legal twist, I think, is that where prior rules prevented such indiscriminate signal-capturing with regard to both domestic-to-domestic traffic, Bush has opend it up so that now domestic-to-foreign and foreign-to-domestic traffic can be so captured. Foreign-to-foreign was always open game; now domestic-to-foreign gets captured in the global sweeps too.
Which is why I don’t think this ad is terribly misleading. An awful lot of possibly vital information would be, if the Democrats had their way, entirely lost. You can’t just say “you can get it with a warrant.” Getting a warrant presupposes you already have good reason to suspect someone of a crime. What the NSA is doing now is capturing lots of signals that won’t be listened to until they get information that tells them it’s worth it to dedicate a lot of manhours to sifting through it all.
Read all of Ace’s post…it is long but worth it.
» Filed Under ACLU, News, War On Terror
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“Getting a warrant presupposes you already have good reason to suspect someone of a crime.”
Thats how we prevent spying on people in our country. Thats the idea that the 4th amendment was trying to protect us from: fishing expeditions.