The cost of higher education continues to accelerate much faster than anything else.
Well it doesn't help when the market keeps getting interfered with by well-meaning politicians that tell you that they can make education cheaper. When the government subsidizes higher education, it just causes the schools to increased their rates. Do away with the financial aide and the market will adjust.
Many problems in the US could be solved by letting the market work. Of course, this answer doesn't help people get elected. Everyone seems to want to know how the politicians can help *them*. So we're probably going to get a more inefficient, less responsive medical system because politicians want to "help." Instead, we should be looking to detach health insurance from where you work so you can stay in the same risk pool. Then laws dealing with pre-existing conditions would be the exception and not the rule. Look what happened to the rates of high deductible insurance in Massachusetts after passing dumb laws.
The market is starting to respond already. Some offices are not taking insurance anymore. They take cash only either all upfront (say $1,500-$2,400/year) or on a case by case basis. They're rates are clearly published so you can shop around. The insurance only kicks in when a major medical problem comes up.
So, please, do not ask for the government "help" in education. Let's ask them to mind their own business. That's what freedom is all about.
If I recall correctly, Bush mentioned a lot of good common sense things for energy back then, switchgrass was only one of the things mentioned. Didn't Bush also mention nuclear power plants? I wonder when people will also wake up to that idea again. I know here in California, Assemblyman Chuck DeVore has tried to put in bills for lifting the restrictions on nuclear power in California. So far, no luck.
It is technically illegal. I don't know if the judge ruled on it officially yet, but the court is expected to kill the tax. It a shame that we have to wait for that. In the mean time, we still have it.
The local tax was attached to the federal tax, it should have been done away with at the same time. Instead, we are now being illegally taxed. Furthermore, the Mayor of Los Angeles is proposing a 9% tax measure on all telephones, next election. It is being sold as a 1% tax decrease instead of a 9% increase on something that should not be currently exist. To makes things worse, the Los Angeles Times actually reported the Mayor's spin on this! No wonder the Los Angeles Times is loosing subscribers.
So far, no world on any of this money being refunded to the taxpayers.
Do you own the receipts or do the customers? This is similar to law about Call Detail Records. My understanding is that only a few states have laws that explicitly state that CDR's are private customer data. Traditionally CDR's are owned by the company and they can do whatever they want with them. They can sell the data or give it to the government to help in investigations. It is only more recently that CDR's have become an issue of privacy.
If you go to a web site, who owns the log of the access? You or the web site owner?
What does limited liability mean? I see a lot of people throwing around the term these days when they don't know what it means. Somehow they think limited liability puts executives in corporations beyond the law. It does not mean that.
Secondly, except for a few states, you do not own calls logs. The phone company owns their own call logs. They can do whatever they want with them. They can sell them, or they can hand them over to the government. There are some companies now that consider call detail records private information of the customer, but they still *own* the data.
It is unlikely that this will come as a surprise if you try watching Fox News over the course of a single day when a controversial news story is in progress, rather than flipping through the channel. Commentator after commentator will not only pull up the exact same tu quoque examples to deflect criticism of Republican officials, they'll use the exact same words and catch phrases. That's basic propaganda: if an opinion is shared by many people, it appears more credible, so the propagandist arranges that his voice speaks through many mouths. Dude... this happens *between* news channels. CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, FNC, MSNBC, etc will all use the *same* language to describe something the President or Congress did that day. Rush Limbaugh has great fun putting all these little phrases together into a single sound clip. I remember one example where every major news organization (including Fox) mentioned Bush giving a verbal "fratboy towel snap" to someone (reporters?). The "towel snap" and "fratboy" words were used almost exactly with each reporter.
Rush's theory is that it is a example of group-think. You have people squished into a room all day. They become friends, etc, etc. They start to use the same language. It's not unnecessarily nefarious. It is just lazy.
According to their web site, the channel will go beyond Wall Street and have programming targeted to Main St types. They want to attract small business owners, middle America, etc.
Last I saw, Plone is very web-centric. It is designed to manage a web site. Alfresco is designed to handle documents. It is more similar to SharePoint than Plone.
I posted this before on slashdot. I discovered a while ago a cool system called Alfresco. There is a free (as is liberty) and commercial versions. It acts like a SMB (like SAMBA), ftp, and WebDAV server so you don't have to use the web interface to get files into the system. Users can map it as a network drive. The web interface allows users to set metatags, retrieve previous versions of the file, and most importantly, search the documents in the system.
Alfresco also has plugins for Microsoft Office so you can manage the repository from Word, etc. They are also working on OpenOffice integration.
Don't use SAMBA for.doc and.pdf's, use Alfresco.
I am not affiliated with Alfresco, just a happy user.
BTW, I did not intend to state that I believe people in GITMO are or should be considered PoW's. I was trying to point out that there are rules to war and some rules do allow people to be held for an unknown amount of time. It is up to their home country to try to get them back. Since terrorists in this case are not fighting for a specific country, they really screw themselves over. That is not our fault.
We're not talking just any non-Citizen though. We are talking about people captured on the battle field. There are specific rules that govern that situation. Think of the game capture the flag. It's a very simple reflection of the rules of war. If another team captures another team member on their side of the battle field, they get to keep you until the game ends. That is, unless you "break" out. In real war if a person is captured, they do not and never have had standing in domestic courts. They do have ways to be released:
Escape Diplomacy (their home country can negotiate their release as has happened with some at GITMO) End of conflict
Their standing is before a military court. Military courts work a bit differently with regards to prisoners of war.
The US Constitution is a sort of contract between the Federal Government and the People. The People signed on to the "contract" by voting for it. It would be ridiculous to try to made the document apply to people outside of the US as it is just as ridiculous for judges here to apply law outside the US to people inside the US unless otherwise defined by a treaty.
I tried to grabe the lastest source and their cvs server listed on their wiki page is down. The article didn't mention the GPL at all. Is Sun keeping lustre under GPL?
It's called peering. I read some time ago that Yahoo only payed for half of its bandwidth. What that means is that only half of its traffic goes over their transit links. The other half (at the time) is peered directly to eyeball networks (aka ISP's) so it can bypass backbone networks. The outcome of this is that it gets lower ping times and more bandwidth to these networks. We *want* peering. Peering is good.
...and maybe you need an education on the history of "call detail records" and how they were used. Originally CDR's were not the customer's, they were owned by the company. By and large this is still the case. The judge may have overstepped his role by changing the law with this ruling. Some states have laws that specifically declare that the customer owns their call records. Unless I missed something in this case, the government was treating ISP records as CDR's and considered them non-private.
The right way to handle this is to get laws passed that specifically state that logs of communications of customers are owned by the customer. Again, this has already happened in some states.
Depends on how you define "social skills." The many home schooled kids I have encountered have a much better ability to socialize outside of what is normally defined at their peer group. They can converse with adults much better than other kids their age. Although some are too sheltered, I've also seen kids that are very confident in who they are and seem, to me, less likely to be influenced by the day's fad by peers.
SugarCRM is nothing like Alfresco! Alfresco is more like products like Documentum. Alfresco is the solution for all those documents you have laying around your company's share drives. Drag those documents into Alfresco. It's simple, just connect to Alfresco using FTP/WEBDAV/CIFS (SMB). Alfresco will authenticate against almost anything. Alfresco indexes all the documents. Change a document? Alfresco keeps the revisions. Want to start a discussion about the document? No prob. Need to find a document? All documents in Alfresco are searchable. Open a document in Word and see the revisions and TODO's? No problem, there is a MS Office and OpenOffice plugin.
Alfresco gets compared to Sharepoint a lot, but from what I've seen it is much better than SP.
The thing that I'm looking forward to is wiki integration. Now that will be amazing. Full web content managed along side traditional.doc files.
Forget putting.doc's in Samba. Use Alfresco! I wish the word would get out on this thing. It is fantastic software that is badly needed.
I do not represent the Alfresco company in any way. I'm just a person that recently discovered it.
It has been pointed out multiple times that the *target* of the wiretaps are not US Persons. The *targets* are people outside the US. It has long been the job of the NSA/CIA to monitor foreign communications. There is nothing new here. The NSA wasn't involved in criminal law and law enforcement of people living in the US, so they never needed a warrant.
If you were to call a suspect that has his phone tapped under a warrant, *your* side of the conversation can be monitored. They do not need a warrant for both sides, just the side that they have cause to monitor. Furthermore, if you say something incriminating, the police could get a warrant to tap *your* phone.
The new thing that changed is that if the NSA captured a call to a person inside the US, the information could be used to get a warrant and further a criminal investigation. Previous to 9/11 this was a big no-no. When this started happening the FISA judges complained about it. They wanted groundwork before the FISA request. They felt that NSA leads are tainted. Here is an article that touches on this:
"The revelations infuriated U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly -- who, like her predecessor, Royce C. Lamberth, had expressed serious doubts about whether the warrantless monitoring of phone calls and e-mails ordered by Bush was legal. Both judges had insisted that no information obtained this way be used to gain warrants from their court, according to government sources, and both had been assured by administration officials it would never happen."
Why is the government on the *federal* level funding science? At most you could argue that it could find science that is directly impacts military standards and equipment for the Navy.
Yes, Hansen adjusted for heat island effect. The question remains why it appears that the adjustment was applied to high quality sites like the Grand Canyon station and possibly others.
If I believe in global warming I need to see the bug, presented and explained by the NASA official that made the mistake, and I need to see the data that the algorithms operated on, presented and explained by someone with a doctorate in climatology. What is interesting is that since NASA refused to release the code or describe the algorithms, the data had to be reverse engineered. This how the bug was discovered. Not the easiest way to do it, but it worked. The guy who figured this out deserved *major* props!
Anyone can be wiretapped if you call a party that is under investigation with a court approved wiretap. The tap specifies only one party, but both sides can be listened in on. This is the way it has always been. The NSA can listen to anyone as long as they are outside the law of the United States. If that party happened to call into the US the NSA did not stop listening. The problem before 9/11 was that the NSA could never pass the information about the US side of the conversation to domestic law enforcement.
There was a Washington Post article that mentioned how the FISA judges were concerned about using NSA information to issue further FISA warrants on suspects inside the US. See Secret Court's Judges Were Warned About NSA Spy Data
The problem isn't what can and can't be used in court. No one gives a shit about that except the courts. The reason the courts don't want the NSA's wiretapping-without-warrants used in courts is that it is illegal.
No it isn't... as you say:
And the NSA 'can't get a warrant' because THE NSA IS NOT A INVESTIGATIVE AGENCY, you nimrod. Exactly my point. They have been tapping for years and years and years. But what happens to the data? After 9/11 the data *can* be passed on to domestic law enforcement for them to follow up on.
You re-enforced my point. Thank you.
The NSA runs a bunch of computers and does other stuff like protect classified information. It does not hunt down terrorists, and it is not supposed to. It operates the wiretapping system, it does not initiate wiretaps. The NSA is not supposed to start a wiretap within the US without one of three things:
There are no restrictions on the NSA for tapping foreign signals. If the signal happens to terminate in the US they do not stop tapping. The problem previously is that they couldn't do anything with the data when this happened. In fact the NSA had connected dots pre-9/11, but they couldn't do anything with it. The data couldn't legally be used in court. This didn't stop them from doing what they always did. This has now changed. The FISA court is now more willing to work with this now, though some judges are "uncomfortable" with this approach.
1) An actual, signed warrant, by a judge. (Technically, this can be for any reason, but in practice it's only issued because the court agrees that someone is probably committing a crime, and thus the wiretap will involve an investigating agency in some manner.)
2) The CIA or FBI operating within FISA guidelines that let it get a tap in an emergency and then get a warrant within 72 hours, signed by a judge.
3) A signed statement by the Attorney General that the wiretap does not include any US nationals. This is also subject to judicial review, and is designed for spying on, basically, embassies.
Instead, what actually happened is that the AG signed a statement saying that, in his opinion, the wiretapping he wanted the NSA to do was legal, because the President is Really Cool, so they set up wiretaps. (This was not even vaguely an attempt to follow (3), and in fact the government has never even suggested that as a defense, just to nip that argument in the bud. There are specific forms and whatnot for that.)
We don't actually know who was receiving these wiretaps, if it was the CIA, the FBI, or Dick Cheney himself. I believe it's been hinted at that it's the CIA, but I can't recall any specific proof of that. We also have absolutely no idea who was being tapped, despite claims by the White House that it was only tapping international calls made to and from suspected terrorists. Because there has been no judicial review of any of this, we don't actually know said wiretapping even exists except that the government has admitted to it.
The tap is not on US Nationals, it is on foreign communications. If you call a criminal, is your phone tapped or the suspected criminal? The answer, of course, is the criminal. Now if you said something that would implicate you, law enforcement could follow up on you and even go back to the court to tap your phone. This is how the NSA works. They do not hang up if the call happens to terminate in the US. The difference is now that can tell someone that something is up and get the ball rolling (further FISA warrants) to investigate the US side of the call. The domestic side can't do anything with your phone until they get a warrant (FISA or otherwise). This is how taps have worked for years and years.
"Both judges had insisted that no information obtained this way be used to gain warrants from their court, according to government sources, and both had been assured by administration officials it would never happen."
Do you see what happened here? Information from a NSA wire tapping program (that can only tap international communications) was used to obtain further warrants. This was a big no-no pre-9/11. NSA wiretaps could never be used to obtain a warrant for criminal prosecution. Here we have a judge complaining about how they were asked for a warrant. Ask yourself why? Why did the government want a warrant? Why did they need a warrant?
The NSA *cannot*, itself, get a warrant. They can only pass on the information to others to get a warrant. It was decided that domestic law enforcement could get a warrant if they were not solely dependent on NSA tap information. In other words they had to do some field work before they could get a warrant.
"So early in 2002, the wary court and government lawyers developed a compromise. Any case in which the government listened to someone's calls without a warrant, and later developed information to seek a FISA warrant for that same suspect, was to be carefully "tagged" as having involved some NSA information. Generally, there were fewer than 10 cases each year, the sources said."
"According to government officials familiar with the program, the presiding FISA judges insisted that information obtained through NSA surveillance not form the basis for obtaining a warrant and that, instead, independently gathered information provide the justification for FISA monitoring in such cases. They also insisted that these cases be presented only to the presiding judge."
This is what has changed. NSA tap information *can* be used this way now. Nothing has changed with regards to what the NSA has been doing for years. What has changed is what happens with the information.
Slashdot Mirror
Well it doesn't help when the market keeps getting interfered with by well-meaning politicians that tell you that they can make education cheaper. When the government subsidizes higher education, it just causes the schools to increased their rates. Do away with the financial aide and the market will adjust.
Many problems in the US could be solved by letting the market work. Of course, this answer doesn't help people get elected. Everyone seems to want to know how the politicians can help *them*. So we're probably going to get a more inefficient, less responsive medical system because politicians want to "help." Instead, we should be looking to detach health insurance from where you work so you can stay in the same risk pool. Then laws dealing with pre-existing conditions would be the exception and not the rule. Look what happened to the rates of high deductible insurance in Massachusetts after passing dumb laws.
The market is starting to respond already. Some offices are not taking insurance anymore. They take cash only either all upfront (say $1,500-$2,400/year) or on a case by case basis. They're rates are clearly published so you can shop around. The insurance only kicks in when a major medical problem comes up.
So, please, do not ask for the government "help" in education. Let's ask them to mind their own business. That's what freedom is all about.
If I recall correctly, Bush mentioned a lot of good common sense things for energy back then, switchgrass was only one of the things mentioned. Didn't Bush also mention nuclear power plants? I wonder when people will also wake up to that idea again. I know here in California, Assemblyman Chuck DeVore has tried to put in bills for lifting the restrictions on nuclear power in California. So far, no luck.
" Is this be the post-hydrocarbon world finally knocking?".....
It was here 50 years ago with nuclear power. Thankfully, it's finally getting attention again.
It is technically illegal. I don't know if the judge ruled on it officially yet, but the court is expected to kill the tax. It a shame that we have to wait for that. In the mean time, we still have it.
The local tax was attached to the federal tax, it should have been done away with at the same time. Instead, we are now being illegally taxed. Furthermore, the Mayor of Los Angeles is proposing a 9% tax measure on all telephones, next election. It is being sold as a 1% tax decrease instead of a 9% increase on something that should not be currently exist. To makes things worse, the Los Angeles Times actually reported the Mayor's spin on this! No wonder the Los Angeles Times is loosing subscribers.
So far, no world on any of this money being refunded to the taxpayers.
Do you own the receipts or do the customers? This is similar to law about Call Detail Records. My understanding is that only a few states have laws that explicitly state that CDR's are private customer data. Traditionally CDR's are owned by the company and they can do whatever they want with them. They can sell the data or give it to the government to help in investigations. It is only more recently that CDR's have become an issue of privacy.
If you go to a web site, who owns the log of the access? You or the web site owner?
What does limited liability mean? I see a lot of people throwing around the term these days when they don't know what it means. Somehow they think limited liability puts executives in corporations beyond the law. It does not mean that.
Secondly, except for a few states, you do not own calls logs. The phone company owns their own call logs. They can do whatever they want with them. They can sell them, or they can hand them over to the government. There are some companies now that consider call detail records private information of the customer, but they still *own* the data.
Rush's theory is that it is a example of group-think. You have people squished into a room all day. They become friends, etc, etc. They start to use the same language. It's not unnecessarily nefarious. It is just lazy.
According to their web site, the channel will go beyond Wall Street and have programming targeted to Main St types. They want to attract small business owners, middle America, etc.
Last I saw, Plone is very web-centric. It is designed to manage a web site. Alfresco is designed to handle documents. It is more similar to SharePoint than Plone.
I posted this before on slashdot. I discovered a while ago a cool system called Alfresco. There is a free (as is liberty) and commercial versions. It acts like a SMB (like SAMBA), ftp, and WebDAV server so you don't have to use the web interface to get files into the system. Users can map it as a network drive. The web interface allows users to set metatags, retrieve previous versions of the file, and most importantly, search the documents in the system.
.doc and .pdf's, use Alfresco.
Alfresco also has plugins for Microsoft Office so you can manage the repository from Word, etc. They are also working on OpenOffice integration.
Don't use SAMBA for
I am not affiliated with Alfresco, just a happy user.
Very well stated! Thank you!
BTW, I did not intend to state that I believe people in GITMO are or should be considered PoW's. I was trying to point out that there are rules to war and some rules do allow people to be held for an unknown amount of time. It is up to their home country to try to get them back. Since terrorists in this case are not fighting for a specific country, they really screw themselves over. That is not our fault.
We're not talking just any non-Citizen though. We are talking about people captured on the battle field. There are specific rules that govern that situation. Think of the game capture the flag. It's a very simple reflection of the rules of war. If another team captures another team member on their side of the battle field, they get to keep you until the game ends. That is, unless you "break" out. In real war if a person is captured, they do not and never have had standing in domestic courts. They do have ways to be released:
Escape
Diplomacy (their home country can negotiate their release as has happened with some at GITMO)
End of conflict
Their standing is before a military court. Military courts work a bit differently with regards to prisoners of war.
The US Constitution is a sort of contract between the Federal Government and the People. The People signed on to the "contract" by voting for it. It would be ridiculous to try to made the document apply to people outside of the US as it is just as ridiculous for judges here to apply law outside the US to people inside the US unless otherwise defined by a treaty.
I tried to grabe the lastest source and their cvs server listed on their wiki page is down. The article didn't mention the GPL at all. Is Sun keeping lustre under GPL?
It's called peering. I read some time ago that Yahoo only payed for half of its bandwidth. What that means is that only half of its traffic goes over their transit links. The other half (at the time) is peered directly to eyeball networks (aka ISP's) so it can bypass backbone networks. The outcome of this is that it gets lower ping times and more bandwidth to these networks. We *want* peering. Peering is good.
...and maybe you need an education on the history of "call detail records" and how they were used. Originally CDR's were not the customer's, they were owned by the company. By and large this is still the case. The judge may have overstepped his role by changing the law with this ruling. Some states have laws that specifically declare that the customer owns their call records. Unless I missed something in this case, the government was treating ISP records as CDR's and considered them non-private.
The right way to handle this is to get laws passed that specifically state that logs of communications of customers are owned by the customer. Again, this has already happened in some states.
Depends on how you define "social skills." The many home schooled kids I have encountered have a much better ability to socialize outside of what is normally defined at their peer group. They can converse with adults much better than other kids their age. Although some are too sheltered, I've also seen kids that are very confident in who they are and seem, to me, less likely to be influenced by the day's fad by peers.
SugarCRM is nothing like Alfresco! Alfresco is more like products like Documentum. Alfresco is the solution for all those documents you have laying around your company's share drives. Drag those documents into Alfresco. It's simple, just connect to Alfresco using FTP/WEBDAV/CIFS (SMB). Alfresco will authenticate against almost anything. Alfresco indexes all the documents. Change a document? Alfresco keeps the revisions. Want to start a discussion about the document? No prob. Need to find a document? All documents in Alfresco are searchable. Open a document in Word and see the revisions and TODO's? No problem, there is a MS Office and OpenOffice plugin.
.doc files.
.doc's in Samba. Use Alfresco! I wish the word would get out on this thing. It is fantastic software that is badly needed.
Alfresco gets compared to Sharepoint a lot, but from what I've seen it is much better than SP.
The thing that I'm looking forward to is wiki integration. Now that will be amazing. Full web content managed along side traditional
Forget putting
I do not represent the Alfresco company in any way. I'm just a person that recently discovered it.
It has been pointed out multiple times that the *target* of the wiretaps are not US Persons. The *targets* are people outside the US. It has long been the job of the NSA/CIA to monitor foreign communications. There is nothing new here. The NSA wasn't involved in criminal law and law enforcement of people living in the US, so they never needed a warrant.
If you were to call a suspect that has his phone tapped under a warrant, *your* side of the conversation can be monitored. They do not need a warrant for both sides, just the side that they have cause to monitor. Furthermore, if you say something incriminating, the police could get a warrant to tap *your* phone.
The new thing that changed is that if the NSA captured a call to a person inside the US, the information could be used to get a warrant and further a criminal investigation. Previous to 9/11 this was a big no-no. When this started happening the FISA judges complained about it. They wanted groundwork before the FISA request. They felt that NSA leads are tainted. Here is an article that touches on this:
Secret Court's Judges Were Warned About NSA Spy Data
"The revelations infuriated U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly -- who, like her predecessor, Royce C. Lamberth, had expressed serious doubts about whether the warrantless monitoring of phone calls and e-mails ordered by Bush was legal. Both judges had insisted that no information obtained this way be used to gain warrants from their court, according to government sources, and both had been assured by administration officials it would never happen."
Why is the government on the *federal* level funding science? At most you could argue that it could find science that is directly impacts military standards and equipment for the Navy.
Yes, Hansen adjusted for heat island effect. The question remains why it appears that the adjustment was applied to high quality sites like the Grand Canyon station and possibly others.
Anyone can be wiretapped if you call a party that is under investigation with a court approved wiretap. The tap specifies only one party, but both sides can be listened in on. This is the way it has always been. The NSA can listen to anyone as long as they are outside the law of the United States. If that party happened to call into the US the NSA did not stop listening. The problem before 9/11 was that the NSA could never pass the information about the US side of the conversation to domestic law enforcement.
There was a Washington Post article that mentioned how the FISA judges were concerned about using NSA information to issue further FISA warrants on suspects inside the US. See Secret Court's Judges Were Warned About NSA Spy Data
You're a moron, and you linked to a moron site.
No it isn't... as you say: And the NSA 'can't get a warrant' because THE NSA IS NOT A INVESTIGATIVE AGENCY, you nimrod. Exactly my point. They have been tapping for years and years and years. But what happens to the data? After 9/11 the data *can* be passed on to domestic law enforcement for them to follow up on.The problem isn't what can and can't be used in court. No one gives a shit about that except the courts. The reason the courts don't want the NSA's wiretapping-without-warrants used in courts is that it is illegal.
You re-enforced my point. Thank you. The NSA runs a bunch of computers and does other stuff like protect classified information. It does not hunt down terrorists, and it is not supposed to. It operates the wiretapping system, it does not initiate wiretaps. The NSA is not supposed to start a wiretap within the US without one of three things:
There are no restrictions on the NSA for tapping foreign signals. If the signal happens to terminate in the US they do not stop tapping. The problem previously is that they couldn't do anything with the data when this happened. In fact the NSA had connected dots pre-9/11, but they couldn't do anything with it. The data couldn't legally be used in court. This didn't stop them from doing what they always did. This has now changed. The FISA court is now more willing to work with this now, though some judges are "uncomfortable" with this approach. 1) An actual, signed warrant, by a judge. (Technically, this can be for any reason, but in practice it's only issued because the court agrees that someone is probably committing a crime, and thus the wiretap will involve an investigating agency in some manner.)2) The CIA or FBI operating within FISA guidelines that let it get a tap in an emergency and then get a warrant within 72 hours, signed by a judge.
3) A signed statement by the Attorney General that the wiretap does not include any US nationals. This is also subject to judicial review, and is designed for spying on, basically, embassies.
Instead, what actually happened is that the AG signed a statement saying that, in his opinion, the wiretapping he wanted the NSA to do was legal, because the President is Really Cool, so they set up wiretaps. (This was not even vaguely an attempt to follow (3), and in fact the government has never even suggested that as a defense, just to nip that argument in the bud. There are specific forms and whatnot for that.)
The tap is not on US Nationals, it is on foreign communications. If you call a criminal, is your phone tapped or the suspected criminal? The answer, of course, is the criminal. Now if you said something that would implicate you, law enforcement could follow up on you and even go back to the court to tap your phone. This is how the NSA works. They do not hang up if the call happens to terminate in the US. The difference is now that can tell someone that something is up and get the ball rolling (further FISA warrants) to investigate the US side of the call. The domestic side can't do anything with your phone until they get a warrant (FISA or otherwise). This is how taps have worked for years and years.We don't actually know who was receiving these wiretaps, if it was the CIA, the FBI, or Dick Cheney himself. I believe it's been hinted at that it's the CIA, but I can't recall any specific proof of that. We also have absolutely no idea who was being tapped, despite claims by the White House that it was only tapping international calls made to and from suspected terrorists. Because there has been no judicial review of any of this, we don't actually know said wiretapping even exists except that the government has admitted to it.
Some details are mentioned in this article: Secret Court's Judges Were Warned About NSA Spy Data
"Both judges had insisted that no information obtained this way be used to gain warrants from their court, according to government sources, and both had been assured by administration officials it would never happen."
Do you see what happened here? Information from a NSA wire tapping program (that can only tap international communications) was used to obtain further warrants. This was a big no-no pre-9/11. NSA wiretaps could never be used to obtain a warrant for criminal prosecution. Here we have a judge complaining about how they were asked for a warrant. Ask yourself why? Why did the government want a warrant? Why did they need a warrant?
The NSA *cannot*, itself, get a warrant. They can only pass on the information to others to get a warrant. It was decided that domestic law enforcement could get a warrant if they were not solely dependent on NSA tap information. In other words they had to do some field work before they could get a warrant.
"So early in 2002, the wary court and government lawyers developed a compromise. Any case in which the government listened to someone's calls without a warrant, and later developed information to seek a FISA warrant for that same suspect, was to be carefully "tagged" as having involved some NSA information. Generally, there were fewer than 10 cases each year, the sources said."
"According to government officials familiar with the program, the presiding FISA judges insisted that information obtained through NSA surveillance not form the basis for obtaining a warrant and that, instead, independently gathered information provide the justification for FISA monitoring in such cases. They also insisted that these cases be presented only to the presiding judge."
This is what has changed. NSA tap information *can* be used this way now. Nothing has changed with regards to what the NSA has been doing for years. What has changed is what happens with the information.
Democrat's Shade Truth On FISA-NSA