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0 pointsbrown9-212y ago0 comments

You're missing the point. There are court orders behind these "wiretaps".

"Warrantless wiretaps" refers to the program authorized by Bush in 2001 to do these wiretaps without ever notifying the FISA court.

What Obama was campaigning against in 2008 was the executive branch deciding what it could and could not do in regards to surveillance in secret without any input from the legislative or judicial branches.

What is being done now is under the FISA, an act passed by Congress and just re-authorized in 2012, and a law that the courts have upheld (at least, when they've allowed a lawsuit in the first place).

I am not defending the practice, but let's at least be strict about the terms we use. Surprisingly, no one in the government seems to mind a wiretap that has a warrant behind it.

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xhrpost12y ago

The warrants seem rather broad though as they're receiving the information for everyone whereas warrants generally target specific individuals or organizations. This seems more like a technicality but still goes against the spirit of having warrants, kind of like a judge authorizing search and seizure of every American's home and the executives saying "well it's not warrantless because a judge said I could do this to anyone".

einhverfr12y ago

From the 4th Amendment, the warrants clause:

...and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

"particularly" is typically understood to require particularity in the warrant. One cannot say "here is a search warrant for the Island of Manhattan, go catch the bad guys."

The argument here I think is that since pen registers typically require only reasonable suspicion, a warrant is not required anyway, so the fact that it doesn't look like a valid warrant to me is probably just intended to be for the benefit of the telco.

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