US intelligence eavesdrops on thousands of foreign telephone calls on lines that cross through US territory but monitors the calls of fewer than a hundred people in the United States, intelligence chief Mike McConnell has disclosed.
McConnell's comments followed passage by the US Congress this month of a law allowing the intelligence agencies to conduct warrantless intercepts of calls between two foreign points.
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"And so if a terrorist calls in and it's another terrorist, I think the American public would want us to do surveillance of that US person in this case," he said. "So we would just get a warrant and do that."
"It's a manageable thing. On the US persons side it's 100 or less. And then the foreign side, it's in the thousands," he said.
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"The issue is volume and time," McConnell said.
He argued that it takes 200 man-hours to put together a request for a warrant on a single phone number, making it impractical to do for thousands of calls....
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