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Originally Posted by SacTown Chronic
Would you mind explaining, scaeagles, why you believe warrantless wiretapping is more effective than the 72 hours that FISA allows for obtaining retroactive wiretap warrants?
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Honestly, I have no answer, I really don't know. I do have a thought.
Echelon is a system that basically monitors (or monitored - I really don't know if it is still in use) massive amounts of communications, recording conversations, and looking for keywords and/or phrases, and flagging those that the software decided needed human analysis. It could take days or weeks for those flagged calls to come under analysis
Again, I don't know the specfic rules of retroactive wiretapping. If it takes days for those flagged intercepts to be analyzed, it is certainly possible that it is outside the allowed 72 hours from when the message was recorded.
I recall during the 04 debates when Kerry was critical of Bush for around 100,000 hours of unanalyzed electronic communications. Were all those hours that had yet to be anaylzed approved with wiretaps? I sincerely doubt it.
Again, a theory. I have no solid answer for you Sac.