Quoted: Quoted: Quoted: Man, you people never stop amazing me.  Your all against losing the right to own a gun, but the right to have a conversation with someone privately is ok.  So they admit to spying on calls to other countries.  The means they are hiding something.  I personally like the ability to tell me cousins in England, our allie that i dislike Bush.   But you guys are supporting this lose of your right.  This is the same as liberals going for guns.  Where will it stop.  And dont tell me you beleive the politicians when they say they will stop, or that only certain calls are being watched.   I personnaly do not wish to lose my rights because of the possibility of a terrorist attack, that is going to happen, just depends on when and where.   If a US citizen calls a phone number of a known terrorist in Pakistan, I damn well would expect it to be monitored REGARDLESS of who is doing the calling. They're not getting warrants because they don't know WHO the warrant would be for - instead they're wanting to monitor ALL communications going to a known/suspected terrorist. The idea is to monitor all communications TO known terrorists in foreign countries - and that means you often have no idea who is actually placing the call, instead we're just monitoring WHATEVER calls go to Achmed Al-Taliban living in Pakistan at phone number 333-666-9999. They do far more than that.

Like...?

The tin foil is strong with this thread.

Selected Quote:

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

Note the The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications part.

Since 2002, the agency has been conducting some warrantless eavesdropping on people in the United States who are linked, even if indirectly, to suspected terrorists through the chain of phone numbers and e-mail addresses, according to several officials who know of the operation. Under the special program, the agency monitors their international communications, the officials said. The agency, for example, can target phone calls from someone in New York to someone in Afghanistan.

I sure as hell hope they are doing that.

Warrants are still required for eavesdropping on entirely domestic-to-domestic communications, those officials say, meaning that calls from that New Yorker to someone in California could not be monitored without first going to the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court.

As has been the case. So WTF is the problem?

The standard of proof required to obtain a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is generally considered lower than that required for a criminal warrant ­ intelligence officials only have to show probable cause that someone may be "an agent of a foreign power," which includes international terrorist groups ­ and the secret court has turned down only a small number of requests over the years. In 2004, according to the Justice Department, 1,754 warrants were approved. And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court can grant emergency approval for wiretaps within hours, officials say. Administration officials counter that they sometimes need to move more urgently, the officials said. Those involved in the program also said that the N.S.A.'s eavesdroppers might need to start monitoring large batches of numbers all at once, and that it would be impractical to seek permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court first, according to the officials.

Makes sense.

The next year, Justice Department lawyers disclosed their thinking on the issue of warrantless wiretaps in national security cases in a little-noticed brief in an unrelated court case. In that 2002 brief, the government said that "the Constitution vests in the President inherent authority to conduct warrantless intelligence surveillance (electronic or otherwise) of foreign powers or their agents, and Congress cannot by statute extinguish that constitutional authority."

So Bush has the legitimate right to monitor communications of international destination.

Given the above, I support what Bush is doing 100%

Quoted:

They do far more than that.Like...?

Like compiling records and information on all sorts of people who are opposed to whatever the current war/crisis happens to be.

When I was in the Army, working with the NSA and all sorts of other alphabet agencies, I saw a book the size of a big city phone book with the names and bios of thousands of American citizens. Reading through it, it was clear that many of them were activists against the Vietnam War - although there were far too many of them even for that. (Unless you assumed that there were several thousand significant antiwar activists.) It was stamped Top Secret - Eyes Only.  It was apparently compiled by the NSA, in conjunction with their military counterparts. The minute I saw it I knew it was a violation of law. The fact that I saw it on Okinawa told me that it almost certainly wasn't the only such book in existence. They had no real use for it in Okinawa.

As I have said many times, this kind of snooping - far beyond what most people here imagine - has been around for at least forty years that I know of. I have seen it myself. In general, they collect whatever information they want to collect and, from what I can see, there is no effective way to stop them.  

Did you ever hear of the Pueblo incident where a US spy ship was seized off North Korea in 1968? Got any idea what it was doing before it was seized?  Among other things, it was listening to phone calls carried over ordinary land lines several miles inland -- from international waters. That was before the days of computers and high technology. Imagine what they could probably do now.

Someone is worried about the NSA monitoring international phone calls???? Come into the real world. I would bet with the state of the art now, there are any number of ordinary clerks who can type something into the computer and listen to any phone conversation in the country -- with or without official approval and without any oversight.