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I've been mulling this over and need some feedback on what I've got rattling around in the old noggin.
FISA was passed to protect the rights of US citizens against illegal searches.
It's perfectly ok under US law for the NSA to record conversations between foriegn nationals.
When a US citizen is a party to a call, the NSA cannot record it unless it is covered by a FISA court warrant which can be obtained up to 72 hours after the call is recorded.
We do not and will not know the actual contents of the Presidential Order covering 'wiretaps'. In other words, we will not get the facts of the order directly because they are classified.
The P/O is complex enough for the Minority leader of the Intelligence Committee to be unable to render an opinion without His staff studying it, which was not allowed due to national security, and He wrote a letter to Bush saying how odious the implications of that and the order were.
Each issuance of the P/O was valid for a period of time, and was re-authorized every time it was about to expire since the first one in 2001, reportedly some 35 times.
By Bush's own words, this was not about monitoring calls between terrorists, but about detecting terrorists.
The P/O authorized something that the FISA Court would either refuse a warrant for, or was activity that either would not be authorized by FISA (and thus unconstitutional), or was explicitly illegal under FISA.
The actions of the NSA under the P/O was independant of other possibly illegal monitoring of US citizens, i.e. the FBI infiltration of peace activist groups, etc.
These things lead me to believe that the object of the order was not any individual communication, but, rather a dragnet of all communication looking for key words or names. Possibly to build a data store of those conversations that could be mined to obtain background once a target was identified, or new keywords could be searched as they are identified.
The use of the term wiretap by the press is pure spin, sounding much less offensive than recording every word of every communication that was intercepted for future reference.
We have circumstantial evidence that those within the administration used this data store in ways that were politically motivated rather than security motivated. i.e. Bolton's list that was identified but not disclosed during his stalled hearings about the UN ambassadorship.
-Hoot
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