contents of those records. If you say it is unconstitutional to collect the records then the providers are violating and has been violating the constitution for over 100 years.

and having the government keep them for fishing expeditions.

Get it? Private versus government. It's not a huge concept.

It's like bigots shooting their mouths off during sports games. They do that, they're off the air. "Wait!" you say, "What about their right to free speech?" Well, the government hasn't charged them with a crime. The advertisers and the broadcast company decided they didn't want to be identified with some bigot and cut him loose.

Get it? Private versus government. Again.

The problem with the NSA dragnet is that everything is being collected and stored, ready for the next McCarthy to come along and start a witch hunt. And if you don't think it can happen again, guess again. Listen to more of those teabagger ranters. Another McCarthy is already here, just waiting for something to catapult him behind a bank of microphones.

The violation of the constitution comes with the government eavesdropping on private citizens without any cause, probable or improbable.

The Fourth Amendment was passed to keep the government from going on snooping expeditions of any type. The NSA is in violation of it.

Versus government has not been ruled.

There are a handful on here that if the NSA came to their house and demanded a cavity search, they would bend over - or at least, they claim they would because "it's legal" "I have nothing to hide" and "cavity searches are nothing new".

Defense of the surveillance state was abhorred and soundly criticized before Jan. 20, 2009. I wonder why that is?

We are in a very ominous place in American history, with the infrastructure of fascism being built systematically around us by corporatists pretending to be Republicans and Democrats.

Chris Hedges: The Post-Constitutional Era
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_post-constitutional_era_20140504?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%253A+Truthdig%252FChrisHedges+Chris+Hedges+on+Truthdig

Are you saying the person at the US end of the conversation knows that the person at the other end is not in the US?

Have people always assumed that international telephone calls weren't subject to any number of folks listening in?

I'm just wondering what the general assumption has been. Maybe I'm paranoid, but I thought international calls had been fair game for a long time.

much.

I don't know why you say that. In the last year I've been to Singapore, China, Argentina, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, France, the Cayman Islands, and I'll be in London next week.

What does that have to do with anything?

You do know the original reason for the National Radio Quiet Zone, right?

When GTE started building big satellite uplinks, the NSA would put big ears right next to them.

I've never assumed international telephone calls were by any means secure, and I don't know why the fact that I travel internationally a lot would change that assumption.

making an international call without a warrant. What is tricky about the case at hand is that the target of the NSA surveillance is the foreign person, and the content of the US person's communication is "incidental." There are rules requiring the collection of the US person's phone and email content being minimized and not disseminated and such, but the bottom line is that the NSA is listening to the US person's phone call or reading her email without any individualized warrant or probable cause. Indeed in some of these cases there may be no evidence of a crime at all, or even evidence of an intention to commit a crime.

But it's been known for decades that the NSA has been listening to international calls for decades, and suspected long before then. Bamford's book was, what, 1980 or thereabouts?

The point was that it was not used for US law enforcement.

Four (or more) Justices weren't willing to review a previous domestic spying case. (It takes four Justices to agree to hear a case before it can be reviewed.)

Supreme Court Lets Stand Telecom Immunity In Wiretap Case
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1014&pid=260709
Source: Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court is leaving in place a federal law that gives telecommunications companies legal immunity for helping the government with its email and telephone eavesdropping program.

The justices said Tuesday they will not review a court ruling that upheld the 2008 law against challenges brought by privacy and civil liberties advocates on behalf of the companies' customers. The companies include AT&T, Inc., Sprint Nextel Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc.

Lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation accused the companies of violating the law and customers' privacy through collaboration with the National Security Agency on intelligence gathering.

Read more: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_SUPREME_COURT_WARRANTLESS_WIRETAPPING?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2012-10-09-09-58-20

claiming they can't stop a data purge because their systems are too complex.

I know, they can't gather data, can't stop it from being deleted, can't stop it from doing anything, but remember, they are keeping us safe.

They are the dumbest organization at plausible statements to defend themselves I've ever seen. It's like a police officer bashing a person in a wheelchair repeatedly while said person has their hands up, it's caught on tape, and the police officer defends it by saying "I wasn't there." They don't even go with "I don't recall".

but I suspect that they will review the bulk collection of metadata at some point. I hope so anyways.

is to say that the signals intelligence is part of the executive branch's constitutional ability to wage war, and they'll punt.

But he is a Yoo follower. Scalia and Ginsburg and Sotomeyer would definitely reject that position. NSA wants to collect metadata even when we are not at war; so it shouldn't be that simple.