Letters to the Editor

This letter is associated with the following article:
The WSJ editorial page lies about our surveillance laws As is true for most advocates of telecom amnesty, the WSJ editors conceal the fact that telecoms broke numerous federal laws for years.
  • Wait...I'm confused

    The WSJ editorial frames the issue thusly:

    The debate concerns an effort to revise the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to bless spying without a court order on terrorist communications that originate overseas but move through U.S. switching networks.

    This sounds to me like the familiar scenario "Terrorist 1 in a foreign country calls Terrorist 2 also in a foreign country, but the NSA can't intercept that call without a warrant because the signal is routed through a network in the US, thus requiring FISA review." Is that really what the debate is about?

    Because, I don't have a problem with that kind of warrantless surveillance, since neither person is a US citizen or a person in the US. I don't know any rational person who thinks otherwise.

    I thought this was about communications between a person abroad and a person in the US. Yeah, that's gotta go through FISA, even if "Osama's calling." Am I missing something here?

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