Hayden questioning todayFollow

NPR will transmit the hearings live.

Here's the requisite news story cite.

So, as I'm listening to coverage of this, a couple of questions emerge. It seems that public outrage is centered around the fact that records that are held to be private, namely records of numbers, and time and length of calls, were disclosed to the NSA as part of the anti-terrorism powers granted to the Govm't, without the permission of the call makers or a subpoena. However, some lawmakers have said that this info was public to begin with anyway, and doesn't apply to call content.

I'm usually foggy when I hear the stories, and I have a feeling I should be concerned, but not so sure why. Does the President not have the power to authorize this? There is also a lawsuit against Verizon and another carrier for releasing the info. Do they have any legal ground, if the companies thought they were complying?

I could probably just ask Joph about this tonight, but he's off to class and I keep forgetting to.

I saw the topic and immediately wondered if they had finally taken Hayden Christensen to court for his bad acting =(

How the hell did you write that at, what is it, 6:30am where you are?

I'm not a lawyer (in case you were getting your hopes up) but, as I recall, at least one carrier (Qwest) refused to turn over the information on the basis of legality. I'm sure the phone companies hire people vastly more qualified than I to tell them when they might be crossing the line. Likewise, the president is supposed to have people telling him the same thing. If both sides' counsel are giving them different versions on what's legal, you don't know the truth until it goes to court. Which this almost certainly will not.

AT&T and BellSouth have both now denied participating in the program although they used the sort of precise phrasing that makes you wonder where the 'out' is. Both have undergone mergers recently (AT&T/SBC and BellSouth/MCI) and the wording of their denials could allow, as an example, MCI to have participated pre-merger but BellSouth did not. I suppose we won't know for sure unless there's a true investigation, subpoenas drawn up and the rest of the dog and pony show.

The bulk of Americans not being upset doesn't mean there is no public outrage. Even back when the poll numbers for Iraq were in the 70+% range (immediately after the fall of Baghdad), I don't think anyone would have claimed there was no public outrage. It was just the minority opinion.

*Shrug* Public outrage. Outrage expressed publicly.

Public outrate is such a loose term =P

There's public outrage whenever someone gets voted off American Idol, and who really cares about that!

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public outrage

Love the avatar, Danalog!

Next time I'll use the word "hoopla" or perhaps "hubub" to try to cater to your sense of the ridiculous.

First off, you've got to remember that we're talking about two completely different programs. Unfortunately, most detractors will tend to blur them into one, largely because it allows for exactly the kind of confusion you're running into.

From what I heard, when all this came out, it was specified that it wasn't aimed at common everyday folk but rather people under suspicion of terrorism

This is in reference to the actual electronic surveilance program going on in the middle east. This one involves actually tapping trunklines and recording phone conversations. And it is limited to lines outside the US, and only calls including numbers on a "list" of terrorist related numbers are going to be listened to (althought there's nothing other then data storage to prevent them from actually recording all the calls. In any case, it's not illegal for them to do so since these are all outside the US).

While that program *can* involve a call in which one end is inside the US, unless you happen to regularly call terrorists in the middle east, no one's going to listen to your conversation. More to the point, this program *cannot* pick up a purely domestic phone conversation since those wont be routed through the trunk lines where the tapping equipment is operating (domestic calls don't get routed outside the country).



The "new" NSA thing is totally unrelated. It's a move by the NSA to effectively subpeona all phone records in the US. Note, that phone records are *not* protected by the 4th ammendment. Never have been. The fact that it's a subpeona involved and not a warrant is your first clue.

It's important to note that this is *not* a spying program. The content of these calls is not being recorded. Nothing about this program can possibly result in the NSA listening in on your phone calls (unless they get a warrant like everyone else of course). What this does do is allow the NSA to call up records of numbers and connect dots in terms of following future leads.

Let's say that we find a terrorist. He's got a cell phone. We need to figure out everyone who might be involved in his terrorist group and fast. This data allows the NSA to literally generate a list of every number he's ever called since the list has been kept. That gives them a starting point to work from and significantlly narrows down the number of people they have to check out.


It's phone records guys. Not phone call recordings. Phone records, while technically "private" are not owned by you. They're owned by your phone company. They typically keep those records for a period of time (so they can bill you if nothing else). It's also a very accepted practice for phone companies to hand over phone records to law enforcement (no warrant needed). Sure. The phone company doesn't have to. But what are they really protecting? Anyone who actually thinks that a record of their phone calls is "private" is going to be woefully disappointed if they're ever investigated for anything at all.

The only thing new about this is the that NSA is essentially asking for all records all the time instead of simply asking the phone company when/if they need a particular set of records. I'd imagine that this is for two reasons: Speed of access, and duration of storage. The phone companies aren't likely to spend the money keeping records in active storage for years and decades at a time. The information can still be obtained, but it would require going back through archived data and could take days instead of seconds. It's just about efficiency.

Point is that there's absolutely nothing the NSA can do with your phone records with this program that they couldn't do before. It's really not as big a deal as many people make it out to be. Of course, I think most of the people who are most opposed to it do confuse this program with the earlier one, and think that this means that they're recording conversations in the US. And *that* gets them riled up.

So far, every survey I've seen done indicates that once people are informed that it's only the phone records and not actual recordings of their calls that are being kept, the great majority of them don't have any problem with it.