"Does it make sense to say you need a warrant to spy on one person, but no warrant to spy on everyone?" - Arne L.

Good question...

You should send your comments along to David Kris (if you haven't already), to sound him out about them - the oddity of the "all intended recipients" language and the 1978 vagaries of phone call routing, etc., are persuasive arguments to me, but I'm not familiar enough with the state of the technology or the details of surveillance operations at that time to be a good judge. [I do think that the 1970s Congress did an exceptionally good job of carefully and thoughtfully crafting FISA, over a period of years, which is one reason why the reckless attempts to secretively and carelessly change it by today's Congress are so sickening to watch.]

Kris doesn't have the technology background he'd probably prefer to have to back him up in analyzing the drafting of FISA, and of course he's muzzled a fair bit because of the classified nature of what he does know.

I think he'd appreciate hearing your perspective [and I think he'd concur with your concluding paragraph, based on his comments about his FISA research, as is].

As of May, 2007, from his submitted SSCI Congressional testimony re the proposed FISA legislation:

David Kris

800 Connecticut Avenue, NW

Suite 800

Washington, D.C. 20006

His SSCI testimony is linked in the footnotes (#142) of Kris's paper, which I took such liberty in excerpting from here. I assumed an e-mail contact for him was listed somewhere in that paper as well, but I don't see one. Marty Lederman, however, almost certainly has an e-mail address for Kris, and presumably would be happy to forward it to you. Thanks for pursuing this with him, Arne - I understand (from a comment by lhp at FDL) that Kris gave a talk about FISA in New York last Thursday evening, so he's very much still on top of the subject.

More information is forthcoming from the tech-savvy in the communications business. Matt Blaze, a University of Pennsylvania computer and information science professor and former AT&T researcher, who's quoted regarding the link analysis process in one of the two articles cited in Footnote 27 in the House Judiciary Committee's report on RESTORE, has co-written an important analysis of the Protect America Act, as announced on his blog:

A recurring theme in this blog over the last year has been how the sweeping surveillance technology envisioned by the 2007 US Protect America Act introduces fundamental technical vulnerabilities into the nation's communications infrastructure. These risks should worry law enforcement and the national security community at least as much as they worry civil liberties advocates. A post last October mentioned an analysis that I was writing with Steve Bellovin, Whit Diffie, Susan Landau, Peter Neumann and Jennifer Rexford.

The final version of our paper, "Risking Communications Security: Potential Hazards of the Protect America Act," will be published in the January/February 2008 issue of IEEE Security and Privacy, which hits the stands in a few weeks. But you can download a preprint of our article today at http://www.crypto.com/papers/paa-ieee.pdf [PDF]. Remember, you saw it here first.

[snip]

The technical risks created by unsupervised wiretapping on this scale are enormously serious (and reason enough to urge Congress to let this misguided law expire). But safety and security may be subordinated in the debate to more entrenched interests. - Matt Blaze, 1/24/08

http://www.crypto.com/blog/wiretap_risks/

The first version of this paper was linked in David Kris's important FISA working paper at Footnote 144 (the Sun Microsystems link), and, as indicated, it's an analysis of the threat posed by the government surveillance envisioned by the Protect America Act, and successors, to the security of our domestic communications network(s). It's beyond me why this genuine "security" threat being flagged by technology experts - as dangerous to our vital domestic communications infrastructure on multiple fronts - is not raised as an issue, by the Democrats at least, in this FISA debate:

http://www.crypto.com/papers/paa-ieee.pdf

Also, for those interested in trying to understand what this debate is about on an operational level, I left three lengthy comments toward the end of the last thread, to highlight excerpts from David Kris's excellent overview of FISA and the pending bills (also see Arne Langsetmo's responses there). In attempting to decipher all the codewords and misdirection, and assuming Kris's analysis is largely correct, it seems quite likely that the "link analysis" program described in the N.Y. TIMES and USA TODAY articles cited in the House Judiciary RESTORE Report, is the actual "Terrorist Surveillance Program" itself.

Http://www.rules.house.gov/110/text/110_hr3773rpt_judiciary.pdf

Kris's invaluable paper is available for downloading here:

Http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/papers/2007/1115_nationalsecurity_kris/1115_nationalsecurity_kris.pdf

Off-topic, but for those interested, Keith Olbermann will deliver one of his "special comments" this evening about the FISA immunity push:

Tonight at 8PM ET tune in for Keith's Special Comment about the President who would rather protect the telephone companies from the law than the American people from the terrorists.

http://thenewshole.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/01/31/626420.aspx?CommentPosted=true#commentmessage