Quote:
Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
Congress holds hearings and amends the statute.
What Bush has yet satisfactorily to explain is why the statute was insufficient--the application is ex parte, and they can do it retroactively. Basically what he's saying is that rather than amend the statute to make it useful in the circumstances it was better to ignore it and use his constitutional authority (which he presumes overrides the statute) to seek these taps.
And he wonders why the Patriot act wasn't reauthorized. (which, by the way, is another story--why did hte times sit on this story for a year, publishing it on teh day the patriot act was up for a vote?)
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The only thing I could think of is that maybe the NSA launched a sophisticated data mining surveillance system, and ALL conversations and e-mails are under some sort of low-level monitoring. The system picks out conversations with certain key words or phrases, and then someone analyzes the conversation to see if it's something the NSA may be interested in following up on. Wasn't
Total Information Awareness, run by John Poindexter, a similar system?
Maybe the NSA picked up that ball when Congress decided that the Pentagon shouldn't be playing with such things without much more supervision.
But even if a system like that was in place, the 72 hour retroactive rule would still work, I think. Though maybe the NSA was concerned that judges wouldn't approve warrants on the basis of phrases alone without further probable cause.
