[Txsleuth]

Okay, obsolete was my word, not theirs..

I was trying to remember exactly how they said it...and came up blank.

What the guy was saying was, that these terrorist have become so savvy, and that they know they are being "spied" on...so they change e-mail addresses very, often, as well as phone numbers...and there is no time to get a new warrant for every change that comes up...

so...they just can't "use" the FISA court for this kind of work the way they did in the days of rotary phones that were hooked to the wall...and before the internet.

Is that a better description...or are you looking for something else from me...??

[ndt]

"Is that a better description...or are you looking for something else from me...??"

Nope, that was fine, I was just wondering if there was a new word to try to add to my resume :)

There have been changes that do affect a classic type warrant which required descriptions of specific places and things to be searched. As you pointed out for example, historically, one could reasonably expect that a target would use the same land-line phone, that is just not the case with things like disposable cell phones. With the addition of the roving warrant, that should not be an issue anymore.

The only thing that I can think of from a technology perspective that would not be doable with a fisa warrant is exactly what Hayden says they are not doing. That would be a scanning and filtering of a broad swath of untargeted data. I do agree with him in his characterizing of that sort of drag net as being "ethically" wrong, but as for being impractical (from a tech perspective), it is mostly a matter money. The biggest hurdles being data volume, encryption and automatic transcription from voice to text.