They aren't listening. They are just recording them in case they want to listen later. Ohh, and they are listening... sometimes, like when there's a court order. Heck, I spoke with someone personally who used to work in one of their call screening centers. They sat in front of a computer all day and flagged snippets of calls, emails, and text that met certain requirements(e.g. words that would indicate a planned terrorist activity). It wasn't clear whether this was applied only to foreign or foreign and domestic conversations. Though most conversations were in english with a native accent.
"if anybody in government wanted to go further than just that top-line data and wanted to, for example, listen to Jackie Calmes’s phone call, they’d have to go back to a federal judge and — and — and indicate why, in fact, they were doing further — further probing."
Great. So they can't listen to your phone call, unless they indicate why they want to listen to your phone call. I'm sure everyone involved in this program was cherry-picked to ensure that no one says "no" to any of these requests. Oh, and I'm sure all the logs (who asked who for permission, what the reasons were, which requests were granted or denied, etc.) are also conveniently "classified," which you should remember is different than "secret."
I'm saying that the concept doesn't make sense when they're being issued by people who have very similar incentives to the people executing the warrant. The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution essentially says "the government cannot perform a search unless the government drafts a piece of paper saying that they can do a search."
The quote isn't talking about FISC warrants. Its talking about regular Article III warrants.
What's deeply ironic about the outrage here is that FISC was created as an extra layer to safeguard privacy. FISC warrants give law enforcement officials permission to initiate an investigation, not to access information that would otherwise require an Article III warrant.
Wasn't there reports that warrantless wiretapping is widespread?
They may not be listening to everybody's "phone calls", but how about activists, dissidents, whistleblowers, etc phone calls? How about people active in grassroots campaigns, from OWS to ecology, etc? How about people that work at EFF? What about journalists that are preparing a government corruption story, etc?
Heck, they had files one mile long for people like ...John Lennon and MLK, back in the sixties/seventies.
But he is right, somebody isn't listening to it as you say it. Its just being saved in a HUGE database so when they decided you did something wrong that can be used against you.
It's also a straw man argument. Nobody ever claimed voice recordings were collected, all news sources were very clear about that. He's just distracting from the actual complaint, which is that all of the other data is collected.
Well, it does seem like most folks are primarily concerned that they will be listening to your phone calls. So maybe it doesn't make you feel better, but maybe it wasn't targeted at you.
The limiting factor here really is the lack of computational power to listen to everyone's phone calls. As soon as technology gets there, you can bet it'll be on the table.
Every call passes through numerous computers between the speaking parties. Why do you think the largest best-funded organizations in the world would lack the computational power to "listen"?
Usually telecom equipment is near the lower bound of the computer power needed to carry calls; there is not much room for advanced signal processing, speech-to-text, etc.
They are not getting through a single centralized location, and transcoding voice traffic does not require as much performance as voice recognition (the difference is several orders of magnitude). Your average telecom branch exchange station is not anywhere in the ballpark.
The Verizon FISC order addresses only metadata. The PRISM presentation indicates that among the data captured from the providers involved in PRISM is VOIP data, which, would seem to be call contents.
The best explanation I've seen for that is that they are just collecting the content in case it is needed later. If, for example, they see you making a lot of long-distance phone calls to numbers known to be ties to Al Qaeda, then they could 'get a warrant' to actually look at the PRISM data they've collected.
In real life terms, it's like posting an NSA agent in every house in America, who promises to keep his eyes closed. Of course, he can hear everything you're saying, but he promises not to tell anyone unless you say something elsewhere that would give them cause to.
