The New York Times did what they do best this week with a story on the National Security Agency’s once again overstepping its bounds with its surveillance of your phone calls and emails. The story goes that the NSA is continuing its sweeping collection of our communications and, contrary to previous reporting, it’s much more pervasive than we thought. That’s shocking!

Wait…no. IT TOTALLY ISN’T.

The Times wrote in April that the NSA was going outside even the sweeping powers granted to it in the FISA Amendments Act (FAA).

For those of you late to the game, the FAA was passed last July despite opposition from the ACLU and other privacy advocates. The law effectively legalized the unlawful warrantless surveillance program President Bush approved in late 2001. It also gave the government new spying powers, including the power to conduct dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international communications.

The FAA didn’t pass without controversy but clearly there wasn’t enough to stop members and President Obama from voting for it and in July of last year — as soon as the ink was dry from then-President Bush’s signature — the ACLU filed a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the FAA. Oral arguments in that case are scheduled for July 10 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Also on that date? A report is due on the what some refer to as the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” but what I call illegal and unconstitutional warrantless wiretapping of Americans.

In July of last year — as soon as the ink was dry from then-President Bush’s signature — the ACLU filed a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the FAA. Oral arguments in that case are scheduled for July 10 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Also on that date? A report is due on what some refer to as the “Terrorist Surveillance Program,” but what I call illegal and unconstitutional warrantless wiretapping of Americans.

The story of our government’s use of the NSA to spy on its own citizens is multifaceted and doesn’t seem to ever really die. And it won’t until we make sure there are rock-solid safeguards in place when it comes to our communications.

We’d like to think of our surveillance laws as a work in progress. Since the 111th Congress was gaveled in, we’ve been asking Congress to use this year and the upcoming expiring Patriot Act provisions to reevaluate the multitude of changes made to our surveillance laws over the last eight year — and frankly, before that.

Don’t forget that the FAA was intended to fix the absolute disaster that was the Protect America Act. Congress took nearly a year attempting to mop up that mistake and ended up not that far from where it started.

The reality is we need a thorough and holistic look at the laws that govern our privacy and our right to live our lives free from government intrusion. Here’s hoping the 111th Congress will do the right thing and make a commitment to restoring the chipped-away Fourth Amendment.

(Originally posted on Daily Kos.)

It might seem hard to believe, but it is true. The Department of Defense (DOD) considers protests an example of "low-level terrorism," at least according to an exam DOD employees were required to take this year. You would have thought that the Pentagon learned its lesson after its nationwide surveillance program targeting peace activists, called TALON, was exposed in 2005 and roundly condemned. The program and the secretive Pentagon unit that ran it, the Counterintelligence Field Activity Agency (CIFA), were both shuttered in 2007. Apparently it is easier to kill a program than change an attitude.

According to a whistleblower that came to the ACLU, a multiple choice question on the 2009 DOD Anti-terrorism Awareness training exam asked which of the following was an example of low-level terrorism:

• Attacking the Pentagon
• Improvised Explosive Devices (IED)
• Hate crimes against racial groups
• Protests

The right answer is: "protests."

The ACLU fired off a letter to Gail McGinn, Acting Under-Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, demanding that the materials be corrected immediately. Yesterday the DOD responded in an interview with Foxnews.com, admitting the question was on the test that more than 1,500 department employees took. A Pentagon spokesman was quoted stating what should have been obvious:

"They should have made it clearer there’s a clear difference between illegal violent demonstrations and peaceful, constitutionally protected protests," Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Les Melnyk said on Thursday.

The DOD agreed to remove the question from the test and to send an e-mail to each employee that took it "explaining the error and the distinction between lawful protests and unlawful violent protests."

We are happy that the Pentagon is removing the test question, the fact that this mistake was even made shows a continuing lack of sensitivity to the important role that free speech plays in our society. In addition to anti-terrorism training, there seems to be a need for training on basic constitutional values at the Pentagon as well.

We also applaud the bravery of the whistleblower that brought this insult to constitutional values to light, which only highlights the need for Congress to pass legislation this year that provides real protection for federal employees who report waste, fraud, abuse or misconduct within the government. Tell your Senator you want to protect the workforce that is charged with protecting us all by granting all federal employees full and independent due process rights when they blow the whistle or refuse to violate the law, enforced through jury trials in federal court once administrative measures are exhausted, and "full circuit" review.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post had incorrectly linked to our letter to the DOD twice. The correct link to foxnews.com has been added.

(Originally posted on Daily Kos.)

In the weeks leading up to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, FBI officials denied a New York agent’s request to start looking for a known al Qaeda operative who had entered the United States, in what the 9/11 Commission would later call a clear misunderstanding of the law (PDF). The agent sent an angry e-mail warning that “someday someone will die.” At the same time an FBI supervisor in Minneapolis, stymied from pursuing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order to search Zacharias Moussaoui’s computer by headquarters officials who later admitted to that they did not know the legal standard necessary to obtain one, shouted that he was trying “to stop someone from taking a plane and crashing it into the World Trade Center.”

These agents clearly knew that gross mismanagement in the FBI’s counterterrorism program posed a substantial threat to public safety, but neither formalized his complaint or pushed it up the chain of command. Perhaps, like one third of those polled in a 1993 Merit Systems Protection Board study (PDF) of the federal workforce who did not report illegal or wasteful activities they had seen on the job, they feared retaliation. And not without good cause, since the administrative process Congress created to protect some federal employees in the Whistleblower Protection Act are completely ineffective, as a number of whistleblowers and whistleblower advocates testified in the House of Representatives last month. Worse yet, employees of the FBI, CIA and other intelligence agencies are exempt from even these meager protections.

After 9/1,1 President Bush called on FBI, CIA and other intelligence agents to report any breakdowns in national security and FBI Director Robert Mueller vowed to protect Bureau whistleblowers. But the few FBI employees who answered this call — myself, Sibel Edmonds (PDF), Jane Turner (PDF), Robert Wright, John Roberts (PDF), and Bassem Youssef (PDF) — were not protected. It should be no surprise then that a Department of Justice Inspector General survey (PDF) released in May found that 42 percent of FBI agents don’t report all of the misconduct they see on the job, and 18 percent never report any.

The myriad scandals involving the FBI, CIA and NSA from spying on political activists, to warrantless wiretapping, to torture, more than demonstrate the need for more whistleblowers in the intelligence community. It’s even been reported that the intelligence agencies sometimes lie to Congress about their activities, but Congress has been too slow to protect the brave agents within these agencies that might actually tell the truth. The ACLU vigorously supports meaningful legal protections for all whistleblowers, and particularly for federal employees and contractors within the law enforcement and intelligence communities, where abuse and misconduct can have the most direct consequences to our liberty and security.

With renewed calls for greater accountability over the intelligence community, there is a new effort in Congress to protect whistleblowers. A House bill, H.R. 1507, would finally provide real protections to all federal employees and contractors — including intelligence agents — who are willing to speak out when waste, fraud or abuse of authority endanger our security or violate the law, by providing independent due process guaranteed by the right to jury trials once the administrative process is exhausted. But as important as what this bill does for national security whistleblowers is what it does not do to national security: H.R. 1507 does not authorize intelligence community employees to leak classified information to the media or to any other person who does not have the appropriate security clearances. In fact, by providing safe avenues for agency employees to report waste, fraud and abuse to the appropriate authorities and to Congress, there will be less of a need to anonymously leak information in order to have serious problems addressed.

But there is work yet to do. The Senate whistleblower bill, S. 372, while making some meaningful improvement to the current administrative process, does not provide federal whistleblowers the right to take their cases to a jury and the bill does not extend any protections to FBI, CIA or other intelligence agency employees.

Congress needs access to information about mismanagement and misconduct within the intelligence community, both classified and unclassified, in order to perform its constitutional duty to check abuses of power and ensure Americans’ security is being adequately protected. But Congress cannot perform effective oversight unless informed federal employees and contractors are willing to tell the truth about what is happening within these agencies. And it is simply unfair to expect them to tell the truth if they know it will cost them their jobs.

The Senate is holding a hearing on its bill tomorrow. Let your voice be heard. Tell your Senator to extend meaningful protection to the workforce that is charged with protecting us all by granting all federal employees full and independent due process rights when they blow the whistle during government investigations or refuse to violate the law, enforced through jury trials in federal court once administrative measures are exhausted, and “full circuit” review. Perhaps the next time FBI or CIA agents see breakdowns in terrorism investigations, they will have the confidence to report these problems to Congress before another disaster happens.

Back in late 2005 and early 2006, when the New York Times and USA Today revealed that the phone companies had been providing the National Security Agency (NSA) access to their customers’ calling records and to the content of their electronic communications, the three California affiliates of the ACLU and the ACLU of Illinois sued the phone companies for violating the privacy of millions of their customers. In addition, at the urging of local ACLU offices, a number of state Public Service Commissions began inquiring into the companies’ actions.

These lawsuits were part of a larger group of lawsuits filed across the country, seeking to hold the phone companies accountable for their role in this massive invasion of their customers’ privacy. Eventually, all of those lawsuits were consolidated in federal district court in San Francisco before Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker. Yesterday, Judge Walker ruled that an immunity provision enacted by Congress last summer requires dismissal of all of the suits against the phone companies. And although we plan to appeal that decision, the ruling – if upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals – would give the phone companies a free pass for flouting both the law and the privacy rights of their customers.

The Bush administration’s illegal program of spying on the communications of millions of Americans would never have been possible without the active participation of telephone companies like AT&T and Verizon Communications, Inc. Two sets of federal statutes, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), as well as a number of state laws, explicitly prohibited the phone companies from giving the NSA access to the contents of customers’ communications and to their calling records without court orders. So when the NSA asked for that access without a court order, it wasn’t just the privacy rights of their customers, but the law itself, that required the phone companies to say: “No.” Indeed, that is just what Qwest Communications did when the NSA made its improper demands.

But other phone companies – taking their cue from the Bush Administration – decided they were above the law. And when their outraged customers tried to hold them accountable for their actions, the phone companies and the Bush Administration turned to Congress for help. Last July, Congress caved, and as part of a set of amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, attempted to give the telecommunication companies amnesty for having broken the law. (You may recall that the ACLU is also challenging the constitutionality of other amendments included in the package, which vastly expand the power of the NSA to spy on our communications).

Not only did the immunity legislation set a dangerous precedent; it is also unconstitutional. When the government asked Judge Walker to dismiss the cases, relying on the new immunity provision, we argued that Congress lacks the power to take away rights granted under the Fourth and First Amendment. It is unconstitutional for a number of other reasons, as well. We will now make that argument before the court of appeals and ask them to overturn the ruling dismissing these suits.

Civil liberties have become a central focus of the national conversation about the kind of country we want to be. Millions of Americans are looking for signals that restoring the Constitution is a priority among all branches of our government. We must be allowed to get at the truth about illegal eavesdropping. Letting the telephone companies off the hook contradicts a core premise of our democracy: no one is above the law. We can’t the turn the page on one of the darkest, starkest violations of freedom under the Bush Administration unless we are allowed to shine light on the facts.

(Originally posted on the ACSBlog.)

Last week the New York Times broke a story that came as no surprise: when armed with expansive dragnet surveillance authority that lacks meaningful safeguards, the government will intercept huge numbers of private, domestic communications between Americans. What’s worse, the government seems to acknowledge the likelihood of such overreaching surveillance, but believes that through trial and error it will eventually solve the problem — notwithstanding the constitutional violations committed in the meantime.

How Did We Get Here?

The recent revelations involve surveillance implemented under the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), which went into law last July. The FAA is the latest attempt to provide legislative approval to some of the surveillance tactics the government implemented secretly until 2005, when the existence of the National Security Agency (NSA) warrantless wiretapping program was uncovered (by the same two Times journalists who wrote last week’s piece).

Normally, before it can wiretap a suspected criminal, terrorist or spy, the government must show probable cause to believe the surveillance target is engaging in unlawful activity or acting for a “foreign power” or terrorist organization, and it must specify the “facilities” (e.g., phone number) it will tap into. Not so under the FAA: the government can now engage in sweeping, suspicion-less surveillance programs with only the most minimal judicial oversight.

Based on a certification to the special surveillance court that it will not intentionally “target” specific Americans or purely domestic communications and that it will take steps to “minimize” inappropriate use of intercepted information, the government wields authority to pursue surveillance on a massive scale without ever identifying particular persons or places it intends to focus its surveillance on. While a “significant purpose” of the surveillance must be “to obtain foreign intelligence information,” the government is not required to assert that its targets are suspected of any wrongdoing or any connection to terrorism or espionage.

This represents a radical departure from the constitutional standards governing surveillance of private communications. As the ACLU has argued in pending litigation challenging the constitutionality of the statute, this system invites surveillance of innocent Americans on a large scale.

Predictable “Over-collection”

What was predictable from the face of the new law has apparently already played out in practice. Here’s the crux of the recent Times’ report: “Several intelligence officials, as well as lawyers briefed about the matter, said the NSA has been engaged in ‘over-collection’ of domestic communications of Americans. They described the practice as significant and systematic, although one official said it was believed to be unintentional.”

In other words, spy agencies did not set out to intercept purely domestic communications — that would be an outright violation of the statute. Instead, they instituted what were probably very broad dragnet surveillance programs (it is impossible to know the precise details), for which the FAA clearly grants authority. Vacuuming up large batches of communications predictably results in netting some that are meant to be protected, and that seems to be what happened here.

Almost as disturbing as this large-scale privacy violation is that this is exactly what the statute envisions—a series of trial-and-error experiments as the NSA calibrates its “targeting” procedures. The cost of that kind of experimentation, of course, is the invasion of constitutionally protected privacy that must occur in order to prompt the government to tweak its methods.

Indeed, the government’s litigation papers seem eerily prescient when compared to the Times report. According to the Times, the “over-collection problems appear to have been uncovered as part of the twice-annual certification” that, under the FAA, the government must provide to the surveillance court. This is exactly the dynamic that the government, in litigation, has claimed will guard the privacy rights protected by the Fourth Amendment.

The reporting requirement, the government has argued, helps ensure the statute’s compliance with the Fourth Amendment, because the surveillance court “can assess how often approved targeting procedures result in targeting mistakes and thereby develop a body of experience to guide future decisions on whether to continue approving similar targeting procedures.” Developing a “body of experience” sure sounds nice, but it writes off, as a mere part of the learning process, the individuals whose private communications get swept within the government’s mass search program. Remember, these aren’t the communications of terrorism suspects; the government doesn’t have to show any reason to believe its surveillance is that finely targeted. But it is only by intercepting such communications that the NSA develops the “experience” necessary to (perhaps, eventually) intercept only international communications.

The good news is that the rest of us also get to develop a “body of experience” about what the FAA means for Americans’ constitutional rights. As the ongoing legal challenge asserts, large-scale surveillance programs stand a far greater chance of invading legitimate expectations of privacy when the main safeguards are attached to the “back-end” (i.e., what happens after communications are intercepted) instead of implementing deeply rooted “front-end” protections — for example, a showing to a judge that the proposed surveillance is based on a specific belief that the targets of surveillance are engaging in illegal activity or are connected to terrorism.

This idea isn’t novel. It finds expression, most famously, in the Fourth Amendment.

A series of leaked "intelligence" reports have caused quite a dust-up over the last several weeks. A Texas fusion center warned about a terrorist threat from "the international far Left," the Department of Homeland Security and a Missouri fusion center warned of threats posed by right-wing ideologues, and a Virginia fusion center saw threats from across the political spectrum and called certain colleges and religious groups "nodes of radicalization." These are all examples of domestic security gone wrong. The way for local police to secure their communities against real threats is to focus on criminal activities and the individuals involved in criminal activities.

If these "intelligence" reports described recent crimes and the people who perpetrated them, there would be little problem from a civil rights perspective, and it could actually be helpful to the average police officer. Instead, they have followed a "radicalization" theory popularized by the NYPD (PDF). That theory postulates that there is a "path" to terrorism that includes the adoption of certain beliefs, and political, religious, or social activism is viewed as another step toward violence. Actual empirical studies of terrorism conducted in the Netherlands and Britain refute this theory, but the idea that hard-to-find terrorists can be caught by spying on easy-to-find activists appears too hard to resist to U.S. law enforcement. This anti-scientific approach to counter-terrorism might explain the steady drop in terrorism prosecutions.

Even if First Amendment concerns are put aside, vague intelligence reports like these are entirely unhelpful to the street cop or agent. What could a cop reading the Virginia fusion center report do but start watching student groups? What could an agent reading the Missouri fusion center report do but start monitoring the above-ground anti-tax, anti-abortion and pro-gun activists? These are places you are unlikely to find the bad guys. Information about a suspicious arson, or the methods of an individual convicted of sending dangerous substances through the mail might actually arm a law enforcement officer with information he or she could use to solve crimes in their own areas. Focusing on ideas rather than crime, the latest bulletin from DHS cites an increase in "rhetoric," yet doesn’t even mention reports that there was a dirty bomb found in an alleged white supremacist’s house in Maine last December. Learning what to look for in that situation might actually be useful to a cop. Threat reports that focus on ideology instead of criminal activity are threatening to civil liberties and a wholly ineffective use of federal security resources.

Does anyone else think it’s funny that the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) have Facebook pages? With the increasing popularity of social networking sites, it seems even government agencies don’t want to be left behind.

Although the agencies claim that their presence online is intended to serve as an additional recruiting tool, it’s impossible to ignore the CIA’s self-description on Facebook: "We Gather. We Analyze. We Inform."

Here’s a tidbit: In September 2008, Facebook hired Ted Ullyot — former Chief of Staff for Bush administration Attorney General Alberto Gonzales — to be its Vice President and General Counsel. Of his time spent working for the Bush administration, Ullyot has said, "I have nothing but good to say about it," and stated that a major appeal of the position with Facebook included "[o]perating in a fast-moving environment where the legal framework is less-developed."  "Less developed," seriously?

Nicole Ozer, civil liberties and technology policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, stated in an earlier news article about the CIA on Facebook: "If (the CIA) knows about Facebook, and they have a page on Facebook, it would be surprising if they weren’t using it in other ways."

The NSA has certainly monitored innocent Americans before.  As you may recall from lawsuits and Freedom of Information Act requests that we’ve filed — under the Bush administration the NSA conducted warrantless surveillance of innocent Americans’ phone calls and emails — in violation of federal law and the Constitution.  And, we’re still trying to get the government to disclose many of the still-secret memos penned by Office of Legal Counsel lawyers that provided the legal basis for the illegal spying program (as well as illegal torture and detention policies that were carried out in the name of national security).  We are also challenging the FISA Amendments Act, a law Congress passed in July 2007 that radically expanded the NSA’s power to conduct dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international communications.

So, much as we love Facebook, "Friend" at your own risk!

In a major free-speech victory yesterday, a federal appeals court sided with the ACLU and struck down parts of the Patriot Act that allow the FBI to prevent national security letter (NSL) recipients from speaking out about secret record demands that strictly curtail judicial review of government-imposed gags.

The FBI uses NSLs to compel Internet service providers, libraries, banks, and credit reporting companies to turn over sensitive information about their customers and patrons. Through NSLs, the FBI can compile vast dossiers on innocent people and obtain personal information such as web sites a person visits, e-mail addresses to which a person has written, or even the identity of a person who has posted anonymous speech on a political website. The NSL statute allows the FBI to forbid or “gag” anyone who receives an NSL from telling anyone about the record demand.

Because NSLs can be issued without prior court approval and without probable cause, the FBI issues tens of thousands of NSLs every year. The Justice Department’s Inspector General has reported that between 2003 and 2006, the FBI issued nearly 200,000 NSLs. The Inspector General has also found serious FBI abuses of the NSL power. The gags that accompany NSL record demands have helped to keep the public in the dark about these abuses.

Although the NSL statute allowed recipients to challenge the gag orders, the scheme had some serious constitutional flaws. For example, the statute required the person gagged to go to court and show they should be allowed to speak. (The normal rule is that the government has to go to court and prove it has a compelling reason to silence you.) The statute also required the courts to defer almost entirely to the government’s claim that gags were necessary. In other words, the statute basically tied the courts’ hands and required judges to rubber stamp the gag orders.

Yesterday, the appeals court found that this scheme violated the First Amendment. The appeals court held that it is the government that must go to court and justify silencing NSL recipients. The appeals court also invalidated parts of the statute that narrowly limited judicial review of the gag orders. The court emphasized the importance of independent judicial review of executive branch gag orders, stating: “The fiat of a governmental official, though senior in rank and doubtless honorable in the execution of official duties, cannot displace the judicial obligation to enforce constitutional requirements. ‘Under no circumstances should the Judiciary become the handmaiden of the Executive.’” The appeals court also ruled that the government must now justify the gag on the John Doe NSL recipient in the case, a gag that has been in place for more than four years.

The ACLU originally filed this case in April 2004 on behalf of an Internet Service Provider (ISP) that received an NSL. Because the FBI imposed a gag order on the ISP, the lawsuit was filed under seal, and even today the ACLU is prohibited from disclosing its client’s identity. The FBI continues to maintain the gag order even though the underlying investigation is more than four years old and may well have ended, and even though the FBI abandoned its demand for records from the ISP over a year and a half ago.

After Judge Victor Marrero of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York struck down the NSL statute in September 2004, Congress amended the NSL law. Soon thereafter, the ACLU brought a new challenge to the amended statute, and in September 2007 Judge Marrero again found the statute unconstitutional. The appeals court ruling yesterday upheld part of Judge Marrero’s September 2007 ruling.

In response to the decision yesterday, ACLU attorney Melissa Goodman stated:

We are gratified that the appeals court found that the FBI cannot silence people with complete disregard for the First Amendment simply by saying the words ‘national security. This is a major victory for the rule of law. The court recognized the need for judicial oversight of the government’s dangerous gag power and rejected the Bush administration’s position that the courts should just rubber-stamp these gag orders. By upholding the critical check of judicial review, the FBI can no longer use this incredible power to hide abuse of its intrusive Patriot Act surveillance powers and silence critics.”

Learn more about NSLs and the Patriot Act by downloading our Surveillance Society fact sheet.

Today, we filed another brief (and our last at this stage of the game) in our case challenging the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA). It lays out our arguments for why the law violates the Constitution. It also explains why our plaintiffs, attorneys, journalists and human rights organizations are harmed by the law and have standing to challenge it.

The case was originally filed back in July - less than 24 hours after the FAA was singed into law - and challenges the constitutionality of the surveillance law that grants the government’s unprecedented power to conduct warrantless, suspicion-less dragnet monitoring of Americans’ international communications with the help of U.S. telecomm companies. The law not only essentially legalized the secret warrantless spying program the president approved in late 2001, it gave the government expanded spying powers, including the power to conduct dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international communications without ever telling a court who it intends to spy on, what phone lines and email addresses it intends to monitor, where its surveillance targets are located, why it’s conducting the surveillance or whether it suspects any party to the communication of wrongdoing.

In the brief filed today, we argue that the government needs a warrant before it can monitor the content of our communications and that the FAA is unreasonable. We also argue that our plaintiffs have good reason to believe that the government is using the FAA to monitor their communications. In fact, the FAA has already compelled them to take costly and burdensome measures to protect the confidentiality of their telephone and email communications; caused them to forego some communications that are especially sensitive; and discouraged sources from giving them information that is relevant and necessary to their work.

The government should not be allowed to collect thousands or millions of Americans’ communications without any of the Fourth Amendment’s traditional requirements or safeguards (like prior judicial approval, suspicion, limits on what they can collect). It violates Americans’ rights to free speech and privacy. And the FAA is just one of the many troubling surveillance practices we’ve seen since 9/11. (See our Surveillance Society fact sheet to learn more.)

Last week, the ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation were back before a judge in San Francisco arguing against the government’s motion to dismiss in Hepting v. AT&T, the granddaddy of class-action lawsuits against just one of the telecoms accused of colluding with the NSA to spy on Americans’ calls. ACLU of Illinois Legal Director Harvey Grossman spoke with Glenn Greenwald about Tuesday’s hearing on Salon Radio. You can read the transcript, or listen here. It’s a fascinating discussion for the FISA and wiretapping buffs among you.