BUT, actual wiretapping, listening to US phones in the US still requires a warrant, yes?...Americans can be listened to without a warrant IF they are heard overseas. But not if the tap is in the US...It is now and always has been illegal to have a wiretap on a US phone without a warrant.

The government can now monitor every call or email from the US to any location outside of the US without a warrant, or for that matter, any location that it "believes" is outside of the US. Every call or email coming in to or out of the U.S. can now be tapped without a warrant or cause, and the provision is so broad that many calls within the US can now be tapped without a warrant, as well. As ondelette pointed out to you, "The crap that you wrote about tapping in London is officially a thing of the past, the new law does not require any particular location for the tap. It doesn't even require one party to be in London, the person tapping just has to think they are there."

Well, the storms are rolling down from the Carpathians like an avalanche...and the lightning is fierce so I think even Zeus is pissed off about what's gone down the last few days.

I'm sure a lot of folks have FISA fatigue and outrage overdose and, hell, who can blame them? So it's very heartening for me to see the G.G. Gang (with a few notable exceptions) stronger, angrier, resolved, spoiling for a fight, bloodied but not bowed (unlike the "bowing" dems)...

I'm kind of a newbie here, Ondolette, so I don't "know" you yet...but it's very obvious that you were missed. And your astute, informed explanations of such arcane material are so clear that even a tech dunder-head like me can understand them....I look forward to being further educated.

It's 10:30PM in Romania so I'm gonna' hit the hay.

Sweet dreams, y'all ~

I am amazed by the attempt to make a distinction between data mining and wiretaps. No data can be mined until all the data has been recorded, and it makes no difference if the data is recorded using an old-fashioned wiretap on your phone as in Watergate, or a modern interception room as in the AT&T office in California.

Let me give an example to explain this, using Amazon. They record all of your buying history and your surfing history and have that connected to your actual identity. Are they data mining?

That depends on what THEY choose to do with the data they have collected. If they combine your data with others and summarize it, they can tell you things like 'People who bought book A also bought book B'. That's data mining.

However with the exact same data, they can also tell you what YOU have and what YOU have done. For example, if you look at book A in the morning and then come back to buy it in the afternoon, the price will be higher. This isn't data mining since it's not summarized over many users. It's using your data in their interests, to raise prices when they think the traffic will bear it. They can do that because they HAVE all the data.

What's the difference between data mining your phone calls and listening to every word you say in your phone calls? The data is the same. We just call it by the neutral term data mining if the listeners are nice enough to only look at summaries rather than details. But they have the details.

So the claim that the feds can only do data mining of your phone calls means that the feds CAN listen to every word of your phone calls. We just all have to hope they'll be nice and only use some of what they can get (talk about terrorist plots) rather than all of what they can get (every word you say that they can claim they thought was routed through a foreign country).

There is a problem with the idea of "voting" them out of their jobs. The only political party that will be damaged by this process is the Democratic Party. Experience has shown us that all the robotic republican representatives are onboard for treason through the silent gutting of the Constitution. The protection of the Constitution is necessary, because it not only spells out the government's powers, but our rights as well. When the Constitution is ignored "we the people" have no power. Powerless, we now live in an oligarchy or plutocracy and the republic is dead. Apparently, there are not enough people who cared about the strength of the republic, because they do not care about themselves.

No they cannot. It is now and always has been illegal to have a wiretap on a US phone without a warrant. I am going to assume that even you don't think the NSA can physically listen to every conversation that flows in or out of overseas phones. That requires data-mining. A whole different kettle of fish

I'm not entirely sure that you earnestly mean this point, because it seems like many people here have pointed out what's wrong with it and yet you keep making it. But I'm posting here on the assumption that you do.

It seems like you are making the point that "electronic surveillance"--i.e., the monitoring of the actual content of communications, or what you call "wiretapping"--is a general procedure that can be applied either to people "overseas" or to people talking "on US phone[s]." And you're saying that the recent FISA update allows the former (overseas), not the latter (U.S. phones). So the update is not as bad as Glenn has made it sound.

Here's the problem as I see it: the FISA bill actually defines "electronic surveillance" (again, what you're calling "wiretapping") as "the acquisition by an electronic, mechanical, or other surveillance device of the contents of any wire or radio communication sent by or intended to be received by a particular, known United States person who is in the United States" (I don't really know how to cite a part of a bill, but that comes from what I take to be Sect. 1801, f, 1; the link is in my signature). So whenever the bill is talking about "wiretapping," it's automatically talking about listening to the contents of communications by persons in the U.S. Indeed, that is what FISA is all about. So there's no circumstance in which it governs anything other than "U.S. phones."

That said, the distinction you're drawing can only come down to a matter of intention. The government can intentionally "wiretap" people overseas, but can't intentionally "wiretap" people using U.S. phones. This distinction is fine so far as it goes, but it doesn't go as far as you want it to, because of the definition of "wiretapping" established in the bill itself. Try this analogy: The distinction between intending to listen to one party or another of a conversation is like saying that you're intending to watch one or the other of two teams playing each other in a baseball game; that may well be your intention, but you're going to have to watch both to fulfill it. And now compare warrants to tickets to the stadium: saying that the government has to have a warrant to intentionally "wiretap" a U.S. person's phone is like saying that I have to buy a ticket to see a Yankees game only if I intend to watch the Yankees. If I'm smart, of course, I'm always going to claim that I'm actually at the stadium to watch the other team. And because we're talking about intentions, no one can argue with me (i.e., with the government).