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The 4th amendment protects against unreasonable search and seizure. The issue is what's reasonable and unreasonable.

Another part of the issue is who decides reasonable v. unreasonable, and whether or not there is an obligation to explain the boundaries between reasonable and unreasonable.

If you're driving across the country they can't search your luggage or car without a warrant (with exceptions)

Heheheh - "with exceptions."

Who decides what's reasonable and unreasonable? That's a good question. There is no requirement that it be a court or judge especially if it's related to foreign affairs. If it's related to foreign affairs the President has sole authority. Congress only control is through purse strings and in the case of treaties advice and consent by the senate.

One of the questions that' raised by this situation is why they Bush administration chose not to get warrants in certain specific cases. It's my understanding while it took only a short time to get approval once all the paperwork was done it took from 2 days to a week to complete the paperwork prior to seeking court approval and tied up several lawyers. If they had to get a separate warrant for each person/number called prior to or within 72 hours of the call (timed from the time of the call not when a human was notified and listened to the call)may have made it impossible. The systems are automated and look for key words. When the words or other things trigger the software it refers the call after the fact to a human analyst who then makes a judgment about the nature of the call. At that point whether the call was valuable or not you would have to obtain an expostfacto warrant jumping through all the paperwork requirements. In the mean time you couldn't act on the info.

One of the requirements of FISA is that to be covered the calls have to be intercepted in the US. Echelon and the other listening systems have major facilities in the UK, Australia and at least one of the former Soviet Union countries. If the signals were intercepted there then FISA doesn't apply. That's probably true if the analysis by the human is actually done in the US.