Drudge: Spy satellites watch Americans from space

Fred J. McCall wrote:
Thomas Schoene wrote:

:Fred J. McCall wrote:
: Kevin Willoughby wrote:
:
: :Have you read the Fourth Amendment recently? Unwarranted / unreasonable
: :searches are clearly in violation of this amendment.
:
: And just what is being 'searched'?
:
: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?


The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act forbids the intelligence
agencies from conducting any electronic surveillance of US persons
without a warrant if domestic law enforcement would be obliged to seek a
warrant for the same type of surveillance.

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 specifically sets a
requirement for warrants for the use of a "pen register," which is
defined as any device used to record phone numbers called by a certain
user. This was done to override a 1979 court decision that had allowed
police to use pen registers without warrants.

Seems to me that the records of who you called don't
belong to you. WHAT was said would seem to be covered, but marketers
can get hold of a lot more intimate things.

What marketers can get access to is irrelevant. The government is held
to higher standards in many ways, because it has greater powers. All a
marketer can do is annoy me or potentially rob me; the government can
arrest me (or in this era hold me without charge).

How is a listing of who you've called any different than a record of
what web sites you've visited?

It isn't. But that's not disclosable without a warrant either.


--
Tom Schoene lid
To email me, replace "invalid" with "net"