Secret Court to Govern Wiretapping Plan

[Elwood P Dowd]

Secret Court to Govern Wiretapping Plan

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 17, 2007; 3:42 PM

The Justice Department announced today that the National Security Agency's controversial warrantless surveillance program has been placed under the authority of a secret surveillance court, marking an abrupt change in approach by the Bush administration after more than a year of heated debate.

In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said that orders issued on Jan. 10 by an unidentified judge puts the NSA program under the authority of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret panel that oversees most intelligence surveillance in the United States.

Gonzales also wrote that the current NSA program will effectively be abandoned after its current authorization expires in favor of the new approach.

The change marks a dramatic turn of events for the Justice Department, which has strenuously argued for more than a year that the NSA spying program was legal and that the foreign intelligence court was poorly suited to oversee the program, as many lawmakers had advocated.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/17/AR200701170

[The Count]

1. Orders issued by an unidentified judge? All rightey then.....move along

[originalpckelly]

2. No, this is not some new system, the unidentified judge...

is a part of FISA. FISA proceedings are never really released to the public.

[nebenaube]

3. some have said...

That this indicates the Judge mentioned the the AG's letter ruled the status-quo to be unconstituional, etc. But what this means to me is that TIA's neural-networks are now fully trained and operating at some "reasonable" confidence level and they are now shifting the system to run without operator intervention or assistence within the 'filter' layers.

[peacetalksforall]

4. Can you explain with more detail? Didn't understand. Thanks. nt

[nebenaube]

6. simple

To automate the detection process without human assistance requires some form of artificial intelligence. There must first be a 'pattern' to compare/search the live data for. Once the pattern is identified. The mechanism that is to recognize the pattern must be trained to correctly recognize the pattern. This remains largely a trial and error process involving many iterations. Once the mechanism is of a given (i.e. tolerable) accuracy at identifying the search pattern in the raw data the training ends. Any output at that level would still require human intervention (for the purpose of results validation, (and FISA warrents)) but hey, you've reduced the size of the haystack that you are digging through.

Unfortunately, this will probably still result in yet more gunfights between innocent 85yr old ladies and authorities as the doors come crashing down late a night. :sarcasm:

[magellan]

5. Anyone who believes they've stopped domestic wiretapping except with a FISA warrant

...I've got a bridge to sell you.