NSA Blog Stroll
Posted on May 12th, 2006 by William McGeveran
Like Dan Solove, I thought I might offer some analysis of the NSA’s acquisition of domestic telephone records (see previous post here), but then discovered that very smart people had already written great posts. In particular, see Orin Kerr, Marty Lederman, and Kate Martin (a guest on the ACS Blog). So I shall defer.
Filed under: Blogging, NSA, Privacy
[...] Yet placed against the backdrop of the NSA’s program to obtain comparable records about telephone calls, this assurance fades away. While details of the NSA program remain very sketchy (as I complained earlier), it seems clear that no search warrants were secured before the NSA obtained at least some data, and I am pretty confident that previously existing statutes required such warrants (as analyzed in the posts collected here). In the distinct category of recording telephone calls placed between the United States and other countries, the Administration has argued that warrants were not required because of a combination of the asserted Article II power to fight terrorism and a resolution Congress passed after the September 11th attacks authorizing the use of force against al Queda (fairly weak arguments in my view and the view of this memo by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service). [...]