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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (8775)	1/11/2006 9:26:04 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 541475

Gosh. Sorry. There are two phases. The first is to find leads. The second is to snoop on those leads. Warrants are meaningless in the first phase. How can you get a warrant until you have identified for whom and what info you want the warrant? Warrants don't make any sense in the first phase. Warrants are meaningful in the second phase, once you have identified your target. If the target is a US person, then you need a warrant regardless of the medium you're going to snoop around in. Doesn't matter if you're tapping a phone or tapping an email box. Is that clearer? I can only see not getting a warrant for phone calls if you just wanted to listen in to a bunch of phone calls hoping to hear something suspicious and in the process overhearing a lot of innocent people. Exactly. That's phase one, no warrant. If someone rats on them, you can get a warrant. Exactly. Phase two, warrant. I don't see any difference between capturing someone's phone calls and capturing his emails. Both have unique identifiers. One is a phone number, the other an email address. Both are messages. One may be oral and the other written but conceptually and practically they are the same thing.