Why the didn't use the FISA courts. New Technology

[Flabbergasted]

A year after the CALEA passed, the FBI disclosed plans to require the phone companies to build into their infrastructure the capacity to simultaneously wiretap 1 percent of all phone calls in all major U.S. cities. This would represent more than a thousandfold increase over previous levels in the number of phones that could be wiretapped. In previous years, there were only about a thousand court-ordered wiretaps in the United States per year, at the federal, state, and local levels combined. It's hard to see how the government could even employ enough judges to sign enough wiretap orders to wiretap 1 percent of all our phone calls, much less hire enough federal agents to sit and listen to all that traffic in real time. The only plausible way of processing that amount of traffic is a massive Orwellian application of automated voice recognition technology to sift through it all, searching for interesting keywords or searching for a particular speaker's voice. If the government doesn't find the target in the first 1 percent sample, the wiretaps can be shifted over to a different 1 percent until the target is found, or until everyone's phone line has been checked for subversive traffic. The FBI said they need this capacity to plan for the future. This plan sparked such outrage that it was defeated in Congress. But the mere fact that the FBI even asked for these broad powers is revealing of their agenda.

There's no way for the judicial system to approve warrants for the number of calls that the FBI wanted to monitor.

The agency could never hire enough humans to be able to monitor that many calls simultaneously, which means that they'd have to use voice recognition technology to look for "hits" that they could then follow up on with human wiretaps.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051220-5808.html

[rodeodance]

1. so, they just break the law. NO excuse.

[ShockediSay]

2. & deliberately build a construct that

is impossible for compliance

Read 'Shogun' - So sorry, could not possibly comply/follow

[applegrove]

3. Setting new precedents as they bounce "neocannilly" along. Like

the justice department could not have passed a new boilerplate for getting warrants. They could have passed any law at the time - oh that's right. They did.

What they don't choose to do is as informative as what they choose.

[Demeter]

4. I Think It Was The Targets, Not The Means

They wanted to surveille everybody.

[ktlyon]

5. jam it with calls using their code words in normal conversation

talking in code will get more sophisticated
doesn't seem like a real workable plan, more like a cover for something else