[Steve in CO]

Are you intentionally pretending to not understand the role of the secret FISA court? They expressly do allow monitoring for 72 hours immediately and will issue retroactive warrants. Don't like that restriction? Why don't we just get rid of the judiciary completely then and annoint POTUS king and be done with it? Is that what you want? Bet you'd be on the other side of this silly argument if Billary were president. Think about it.

[DoughtyOne]

Thanks Steve. Your post and another have expressed views that were certainly not my understanding of the FISA court. In addition, the FISA court also turns down requests for monitoring. In light of that, how can you say that the NSA can have instant access? If a warrant is turned down, they've already screwed the pooch by your explanation.

[XJarhead]

They expressly do allow monitoring for 72 hours immediately and will issue retroactive warrants. Don't like that restriction?

That doesn't work when you're talking about data mining. What the NSA does is scan every single call. The filters for this program then yanks out all those to or from certain telephone numbers, and in which certain trigger words or phrases appear. It is a constant filtering process of billions of calls each day. How can you possibly get a warrant for each instance of filtering?

Now once they've pulled those suspicious calls and listened to them, they may then decide to put a direct tap on the phone in the U.S. on which that conversation occured. At that point, they have to comply with the 72 hour warrant requirement. But expecting them to do that for the data mining portion of the program reveals a lack of understanding of what that program is.