Monday. The start of a new work week. Time to do your best, get busy, impress the bosses. How ’bout a beer?
No beer needed to understand this by Rich Galen
Last year, after the uproar over the so-called “warrantless wiretaps,” the Congress passed the “Protect America Act” which made some minor adjustments to FISA like including the fact that there were no such things as commercial cell phones in 1978. (snip)
Getting a warrant to wiretap a phone in the dark days before Blackberries was a lengthy process, but investigators could be pretty certain that a call from a certain number was going to be tied to a certain address, because it was being made from a phone wired into the wall, which was wired into the phone system of whatever country the wall was located. (snip)
One of the ways intelligence services do this is to look for patterns of calls. Of most interest are calls which come into or leave the US to and from places where it is suspected people are plotting to do us harm.
There are a lot of cell phones in the world so a very efficient way to spot suspicious patterns is to analyze records kept by US phone companies.
Following 9/11, the US Government asked the major phone companies to turn over their records of calls coming into or leaving the US so the big computers in places like Ft. Meade, Maryland could begin looking for those patterns we were talking about.
Remember when liberals were complaining that B*sh, or, as some of the more extreme progressives write his name, ****, didn’t connect the dots prior to 9/11? This program, simply gathering phone numbers, no names or actual data was involved, connected some dots. If a certain number called NW Pakistan, well, that could be a cause for concern. If it called a specific mosque that is known to have terrorist leanings, cause for concern.
But, no, it couldn’t be that many, many elected Democrats are beholden to Big Lawyer, right? If the lawyers start suing the telecoms left and right, winning silly suits, and your service degrades and costs go up, who ya gonna blame?
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