Are YOUR phone records relevant to a terror investigation?
A warrant is to allow surveillance/search of something relevant to a given investigation. We have a reason to think John Gotti whacked some guys so we want to review his phone records... or more on point, we have reason to think that Abu Faisal is giving material support to terrorists, so we want to review his phone records.
You cannot (or could not) get a warrant for a straight up fishing expedition. "We think somebody in Arizona has a meth lab so we want to search every building in Arizona," would not get very far.
A FISA court acceded to a (Bush admin) argument that all phone records are relevant to terror investigations. This is the sort of thing people do in secret... they don't want the terrorists to win and here is no downside because no one will ever know that you worked you way up to federal judge and then ruled that all phone records are relevant to some investigation. (Unless the investigation is of the phone company that makes no sense at all.)
But here we are. ALL phone records of Americans are "relevant" to an ongoing terrorism investigation. (The majority of American phone records were collected, which is impressive.) The redefination of "relevant" was Bush era, but is still in use and continues to be the operative definition for FISA requests today.
The legal standard is not "potentially useful to investigators." It is relevant. So, with that siad, do you believe that your phone records were and are relevant to an investigation of terrorists?
The National Security Agency's ability to gather phone data on millions of Americans hinges on a secret court ruling that redefined a single word: "relevant."
This change—which specifically enabled the surveillance recently revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden—was made by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a group of judges responsible for making decisions about government surveillance in national-security cases. In classified orders starting in the mid-2000s, the court accepted that "relevant" could be broadened to permit an entire database of records on millions of people, in contrast to a more conservative interpretation widely applied in criminal cases, in which only some of those records would likely be allowed, according to people familiar with the ruling.
In interviews with The Wall Street Journal, current and former administration and congressional officials are shedding new light on the history of the NSA program and the secret legal theory underpinning it. The court's interpretation of the word enabled the government, under the Patriot Act, to collect the phone records of the majority of Americans, including phone numbers people dialed and where they were calling from, as part of a continuing investigation into international terrorism.
"Relevant" has long been a broad standard, but the way the court is interpreting it, to mean, in effect, "everything," is new, says Mark Eckenwiler, a senior counsel at Perkins Coie LLP who, until December, was the Justice Department's primary authority on federal criminal surveillance law. ...
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323873904578571893758853344.html
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