Hayden questioning todayFollow

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.

Actually that's not entirely true, but anyway, assuming it was, they are protected by these other little things we have called ******* LAWS PASSED BY CONGRESS.

Remember those? Believe it or not, the Executive branch doesn't get to light everything on fire but the Constitution when deciding what to do.

If you're talking about a program targeted just at "suspected terrorist cell members", then that is not the same program that Hayden was being questioned about. Hence why I said they are two separate programs. Maybe I'm not getting what you're saying, but it still sounds like you're confusing the two a bit.



The FISA thing is the "long distance calls from the US to someplace outside the US being listened into without FISA court approval". Again. That's a separate program. Totally unrelated issues.

The program Hayden was questioned on was a program by which the NSA collects the phone records and only the phone records of all calls made in the US. They aren't recording them (no surveilance equipment involved, so FISA isn't involved either). They're simply asking the phone companies to provide the records.

Certainly, there is question as to whether this is beyond the scope of a typical subpoena for such records. But that's a separate issue for the legal types to go over. My issue is that there are many people who mix this program (which does not contain any surveilance of any kind) with the previous NSA program (which did, but limited it to calls traveling outside the US). The problem I've been seeing is that by confusing the two, many people are thinking that this program means that the NSA is listening to all calls made in the US, which is patently false.



I was talking about how the data was used, not what justification was used for the program itself. It's not really correct to call it a "fishing expedition". That phrase usually applies to a program where you target surveilance and data collection at a large group and then go looking through it for something of value. That's not the case here though. What they're doing is gathering a large set of data and putting in in a storage area. When they get a lead, this allows them to track that lead through the records they have quickly.

They can already do this, except that they'd have to get that data from the phone company records for each event, in many cases having to wait days for archived records to be retrieved. Yes. The data collection itself is broad. But it's use is not. The point isn't to gather all that data so they can dig through it looking for something suspicious. The point is to gather the data so it's available when they need it. They can't limit the scope of the subpoena'd data to just terrorist phone numbers and their associates, because if they already knew that they wouldn't need to get the numbers, right? They don't know which records will be needed when they need them, so they must have complete records of all calls in order to be able to make use of the data when they do need it.



How can it be profiling when they're gathering everyone's data equally? Profilling would be if they only collected phone records from people with brown skin, for example.

What's strange is that there would probably be *less* uproar about this program if it did target just a set group of people rather then everyone.



Well. Here for instance.

That was just the first hit on google. Not exactly hard to find. And I trust that the Washington Post is sufficiently non-conservative for us to avoid the whole "biased survey" argument?

FTFY. And presumably part of the "grand liberal plan" as well...