There is no dispute that the Government is prohibited from using pen registers without FISA court approval — both under the old FISA and the more liberalized FISA as amended by the Patriot Act.

That’s all good and well, but the problem, as even Greenwald admits, is that the government was not using pen registers in this case: it was simply requesting information from private companies, which they voluntarily provided. Perhaps some more information will come to light that will lead me to change my mind in this issue, but so far I’ve yet to see how this is radically different or more intrusive from the hundreds of other ways various government agencies collect information on US citizens without a warrant.

There is no dispute that the Government is prohibited from using pen registers without FISA court approval — both under the old FISA and the more liberalized FISA as amended by the Patriot Act.

The issue to which we keep returning, and which I have yet to see you address, is that the NSA’s spying program has been conducted without FISA court approval. This is what makes the program reprehensible. There is a procedure in place that enables the government to quite easily obtain court approval, yet the government has refused to comply with this procedure.

The question is why. And the answer, I suspect, is that the NSA program has been used to monitor political enemies of the adminstration, something the FISA court would not allow despite their past rubber-stamping.

Since it is your position that the NSA can’t request anonymous phone records from phone companies without a warrant, is it similarly your position that, say, the Department of Labor can’t request employment data from businesses without a warrant? What’s the distinction?

What is about to happen is that the other shoe is going to drop. I know and you know, if you think it through, is that BushCo isn’t just spying o putative terrorists but rather on their political opponents. Certainly, without accountability, the abuse of power rears its ugly head.

As for the poll results, people will agree to all kinds of dumb things given incomplete information that they later come to regret when given fuller information. Like voting for George Bush, whose approval ratings just hit 29%.

Americans by nearly a 2-1 ratio call the surveillance of telephone records an acceptable way for the federal government to investigate possible terrorist threats, expressing broad unconcern even if their own calling patterns are scrutinized.

Lending support to the administration’s defense of its anti-terrorism intelligence efforts, 63 percent in this ABC News/Washington Post poll say the secret program, disclosed Thursday by USA Today, is justified, while far fewer, 35 percent, call it unjustified….

The phone-records program…is not broadly seen as intrusive. Two-thirds of Americans say it wouldn’t bother them if the National Security Agency had a record of phone numbers that they had called.

Link

You can do with that what you will, although given those numbers I think a lot of Republican officeholders would probably be pleased as punch if the Dems decided to make this a campaign issue.

In response to Chuck:

What a great big bowl of choke-on-your-own-bile stew this is to have a Republican House of Representatives and a Republican Senate and a Republican President serving up this steaming hot plate of shit to dump on the Constitution.

I know it’s become de rigeur for the Left to accuse the current administration of eviscerating the Constitution, but you may want to familiarize yourself with the relevant constitutional precedent on point, Smith v. Maryland, which held that non-content searches (such as those at issue in the NSA program) do not implicate the Fourth Amendment and hence do not require a warrant.

Oh, no. I thought I was becoming more sociable by doing this.