In the US, Support Grows for Whistle Blower Snowden as Anger Increases over Massive Surveillance

[Egnever]

18. I think that is a very simplistic view of the issue

Sure they can get a warrant and see who that terrorist calls but that is not nearly the end. Then you have to follow where those numbers go and determine which have common threads with others you have tracked. All of this could need to be done quickly if there is a lot of activity and getting warrants to follow all of that would be very time consuming just in paper work alone.

Also dont forget many of these calls have international origins so getting a warrant for that information would be impossible most likely in many of the countries.

This is not joe drug dealer they are trying to track these are international terrorist rings.

Many of these phones will be burners with no info on them to tie them to people.

I dont much like the idea of them storing all numbers dialed myself. I can however wrap my head around what they are trying to accomplish with this and spying on you isnt it.

The amount of data all by itself almost ensures you remain the same anonymous person you have always been unless you talk to people who talk to terrorists. It is like you are the needle in the hay stack its just too much data to do anything with unless you have specific targets to try to sift out.

That is not to say that using that stored data they cant find better ways of categorizing it to ferret out patterns and people likely will. I would be surprised if they could do it today.

I certainly think the laws need tweaking but technology is changing the world we live in. There is very little that is private anymore. Hell the grocery store likely has much more data on you than the government gets from this.

This is longer than I meant it to be so I will just say again this is much more complex than just getting a warrant for one phone line and seeing who it calls. It is also such a large amount of data that you would have to be looking for very specific things to really do much of anything with. As long as those specifics are confined by a court review process I have a very hard time seeing it as a problem.