General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Clapper & Feinstein finally admit that ALL phone records going back 7 years are being collected [View all]randome
(34,845 posts)That's not quite the same, although I can see the point that they are parsing the meaning too much.
This is analogous to Verizon handing over a hard drive with everyone's data on it. NSA runs their program that pulls the numbers that match a pattern and that include a foreign caller or recipient. Then the hard drive is stored somewhere.
I don't see that as 'collecting' data since they are not interested in the hard drive once their matching program runs. Sure, your phone number may be sitting on the hard drive in a warehouse somewhere but the alternative is to have all the carriers run the same program and transmit the results to NSA, a much more complicated process.
This all comes down to 21st century technology that our 18th century forebears could not have imagined in their wildest dreams. The 4th Amendment is there for a very good reason but it did not anticipate the complexities of our society.
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