Justice Officials Fear Nation's Biggest Wiretap Operation May Not Be Legal (usatoday.com)

schwit1 writes with news about a vast wiretapping program and questions about its legality. USA Today reports: "Federal drug agents have built a massive wiretapping operation in the Los Angeles suburbs, secretly intercepting tens of thousands of Americans' phone calls and text messages to monitor drug traffickers across the United States despite objections from Justice Department lawyers who fear the practice may not be legal. Nearly all of that surveillance was authorized by a single state court judge in Riverside County, who last year signed off on almost five times as many wiretaps as any other judge in the United States. The judge's orders allowed investigators — usually from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration — to intercept more than 2 million conversations involving 44,000 people, federal court records show."

Comments

Huh? Illegal?

[Lead Butthead]

Illegal? When has that ever stopped the government?

Re:Huh? Illegal?

[crackerjack155]

Yes actually they should be treating them because they are not combatants in the fight between the USA and Taliban. It's also been pretty well established that doctors are supposed to treat anyone regardless of who they are or what side of the fight they are on. It is also well established in international law that it is illegal for any side in a fight to attack a hospital unless that hospital is actively attacking you, regardless of who is in it.

Someone attacking a known non combatant hospital is a war crime and it doesn't matter if the entire leadership of the Taliban was being treated inside it and you had no other way of getting them all.

If it is actually true that it happened, that they knew it was a hospital and nobody from in the hospital was actively attacking them, then everyone involved from the pilot to the person giving the order belongs in prison for a long time.

Re:Huh? Illegal?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you expect doctors to fight your ideological battles that's your prerogative. Just don't turn around and act surprised if the surgeon holding a knife over you decides to fight someone else's ideological battles where you're the bad guy.

America

[frovingslosh]

My tag line says it all.

Time to rethink the "war on drugs"

[The Grim Reefer]

Seriously, isn't it about time to rethink the war on drugs? It should be pretty damn obvious, to even a politician, that casual drug users are not an infinitesimally small minority of the population. How about plowing all of that money into education and actual rehabilitation. Besides, we always have the war on terror as an excuse to violate the Constitution when needed.

"May"?

[Anonymous Coward]

When you're so far over the line that the DOJ says "hey, you might have gone a little too far," that's a pretty good sign you're well into "clearly illegal" territory.

Not, of course, that the DOJ would ever actually take up a case against a law enforcement office breaking the law. Heaven forfend.

Meanwhile...

[Will_Malverson]

...the rest of us fear it may be legal.

"Fear" ?

[Kohath]

Because law enforcement personnel sometimes face consequences when they do something illegal?

Re:but its working

[Anonymous Coward]

False equivalence.

Murder is clearly a crime with a victim. Recreational drug use is arguably a victimless crime, when done responsibly. This is why alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine are legal despite being extremely addictive and bad for one's health. The exact same reasoning applies to most recreational drugs.

Furthermore, there isn't a black market for murder. People committing murder illegally doesn't fund a mafia to the point of being so powerful that it threatens entire governments (and, of course, reigns terror on innocents). People using drugs illegally does precisely that.

So, the reasons why murder are illegal don't apply to recreational drug use. There are clear benefits to making recreational drug use legal, and murder has none of these benefits.

Logic shows the way. Your thoughtlessness does not.