Disclaimer: I haven't been following this scandal at all.

Can someone give me a quick breakdown on how what they're doing is different from, say, in a crime drama when they tell the suspect, "we checked your phone records, and you called the victim three times in the hour before they died." Is the only difference that they needed a warrant for that information in NYPD Blue, and now they don't?

That is the difference and it is kind of a big deal. The Constitution would never have been ratified without it. The seeds of unrestrained power are throughout the Constitution if we do away with the Bill of Rights the people have no protection from the government.

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.


A people, entering into society, surrender such a part of their natural rights, as shall be necessary for the existence of that society. They are so precious in themselves, that they would never be parted with, did not the preservation of the remainder require it. They are entrusted in the hands of those, who are very willing to receive them, who are naturally fond of exercising of them, and whose passions are always striving to make a bad use of them.

They are conveyed by a written compact, expressing those which are given up, and the mode in which those reserved shall be secured. - John DeWitt (1787)

Like many things in life, quick answers are simplistic and time-dependent.

1) In the aftermath of 9/11, the Congress passed the "Patri0t Act"
that stands for Uniting (and) Strengthening America (by)
Providing Appropriate Tools Required (to) Intercept
(and) Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001.[1]

This gave the government the legal power to secretly screen communications
between people in other countries and people in the U.S.

2) The government used this power to gather information essentially
without getting a warrant (... as required in Griff's post above)
More recently, the National Security Act has been extended,
with some changes that requires warrants issued via the secret FISA Court.

3) The current PRISM issue has to do with collecting "non-indentified" data,
such as each phone call's caller-ID, recepient-ID, Date, etc.
It also exposes the fact that every call is being collected indiscriminately,
not just those between U.S. and foreign callers.

4) In order to actually use the PRISM data, the government (is supposed to)
gets the FISA Court to issue a secret warrant for the only the particular ID numbers,
which then allows them identify the people's names and to
chase down all sorts of other kinds of information.

--- I think most people (today) understand that the PRISM data is collected "legally".
But that doesn't mean that they think the government "should" be doing so.
.

But even if the warrant process is corrected, they do still have to collect the data on everyone all the time, right? I mean, it wouldn't do any good to say, "We're pretty sure the suspect called the murder victim just before he died, so let's start collecting data on his phone calls now..." They've always collected the same information (Caller ID, location of the phone call, etc.) on every call made from a landline, right?

It changed with digitalization (?) of communications. Old phone tapping required an agent on the line listening as they didn't have an efficient way to collect and store the analog information. Folks who support easy collection of data argue that it became much harder to follow the bad guys when mobile devices came on line. I'd argue just the opposite, they've gone from a small focused surveillance system to an enormous one with much more capacity using the excuse of difficulty to make their work much much easier than it was for the guy tapping in by hand.

Yes, I agree with Griff.

It is surprising to me that the news has not reported definitively
on whether the digital media (Comcast, etc.) and phone companies
(Century Link, ATT, etc.) are actually storing all the emails, text docs, pics, etc.
and how long it would be kept by such (private) companies.

Or, whether it's all being passed on to the feds daily,
and they are keeping it (forever) ... without reading or interpreting the content.
The daily content would be enormous !

I've read that voice and IM messaging are not kept, but emails might be.

Be that as it may, again I think the personal identification and content of emails, etc.
can be collected legally, but cannot be reviewed or interpreted until a FISA warrant has be issued.

I guess I've been assuming that all communications are passing to the Feds in real time. They claim they have the authority to store the data for 5 years.

Ah, this changes my understanding. I thought we were still only talking about phone data. Content of emails and attachments is a whole different ballgame.

Phone calls are digital just like emails. The concept is metadata verses an actual (data) content.

For example, when you file taxes, metadata says you filed forms. Numbers in each row of each form (that is owned by a company that submits your data to the IRS) are actual data.

Protection means Verizon, Qwest, etc cannot submit that data to PRISM without a court order. Currently, long distance transmission lines can be tapped and recorded at any time by PRISM. In theory, they cannot listen or read it without a court order. But nobody (Verizon, Qwest, the court) knows whether that data is being reviewed.

"Trust us" was a concept advocated by Cheney, John Yoo, et al. And remains a defacto standard.

This is the first time I've seen info about the FISA court in a public news source...

Washington Post
Peter Wallsten, Carol D. Leonnig and Alice Crites
6/23/13

For secretive surveillance court, rare scrutiny in wake of NSA leaks

I now understand that I named this thread badly.

PRISM is a program to monitor suspects outside the US.

There is also the NSA's storing and collation of metadata on (presumably) all US citizens. I don't know if this has a catchy name, but it isn't PRISM.

And this Snowden fellow has been very strategic, first in decloaking in China, then flying to Russia (yet not, apparently, crossing the border, apparently in transit). So of two countries in the world that can (and like to) look the US in the eye and say no, Snowden has managed to entangle both - thereby both thwarting the US government's attempts to pursue him, and getting the story to the public attention in those countries. I'm sure the people of China and Russia have seen the story and most assumed their own governments were doing likewise.

Snowden
 

Simon Tisdall has a piece on cnn.com that applies the brakes to the usual sycophant train from that organization. His take is that the world is tired of our shit. I'm tired of our shit so why wouldn't they be?

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/25/op...ion/index.html

Time has a poll out so I'll cherry pick one paragraph.

Fifty-four percent of respondents said the leaker, Edward Snowden, 29, did a “good thing” in releasing information about the government programs, which collect phone, email, and Internet search records in an effort, officials say, to prevent terrorist attacks. Just 30 percent disagreed.

Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2013/06/13...#ixzz2XKO5iLnk

This is totally going to be a movie. The leak, the political fallout, the manhunt. The smart steps taken by Snowden, like the insurance policy of top secret data that he's left with friends to release if something happens to him. The sneaking around from country to country. Or maybe not. Putting journalist phones in the hotel fridge to stop NSA eavesdropping during the meeting.

That's a fun article to read... it get's the juices flowing.

If only Simon would tell us what he really thinks. :rolleyes:

We used to live in Buffalo, NY and listened to the CBC out of Toronto.
It was often eye-opening to hear what the non-US media were saying.