Henry Spencer wrote:
In article ,
Fred J. McCall wrote:
:Our phone records. The courts have been pretty clear that the police
:need a warrant to get a record of someone's phone calls in a criminal
:investigation. The NSA records trawl represents a pretty clear violation
f the FISA rules for national security searches.

Got any cites? Seems to me that the records of who you called don't
belong to you.

Uh, so? That doesn't mean they are public information. The people who do
own them can still have a legal obligation to keep them confidential, and
to release them only in well-defined circumstances. Property rights are
not the only form of rights involved.


If I were into a lot of conspiracy theories, this would throw the
whole criminal prosecution of Qwest upper management into a whole new
light.

The legal precedences are related to an item called a pen register.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen_register

The law is specific... It requires a warrant to log the info
according to the Pen Register Act. That has *never* been done
in this case and the specific request by Qwest executives for
this to be done was rejected out of hand by the NSA reps. And,
while the requirement is very loose (they do not need to provide
a probably cause), the fact the NSA did not request it is
troubling.

Between FISA and the other laws, the legal regime is clearly
defined. The Patriot Act did not change any legal requirements
for issuing any call tracing, only expanded the legal regime to
cover the Internet. It requires a warrant and since it is a very
specific set of laws enacted by Congress, it can not be overturned
by an Executive Order. The President was not given discretionary
powers in this matter. Executive Orders only apply to non-defined
legal regimes. When there is a direct conflict between an Executive
Order and a law passed by Congress, the Congressional Law has
precedence.