NSA Spying: Bits And Pieces

by hilzoy

Josh Marshall is right: this part of the Post story on the NSA scandals is crucial:

"Yesterday's report in USA Today arrived as Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the president's nominee to be CIA director, faced tough scrutiny on Capitol Hill for his role in the interception of calls and e-mails between Americans and parties abroad. After the New York Times disclosed the eavesdropping in December, the White House dubbed it a "terrorist surveillance program" and said it involved only international communications by people with "known links" to al-Qaeda and its allies. The Washington Post reported in February that about 5,000 Americans had been subject to eavesdropping under the program and that nearly all of them had been cleared of suspicion.

The new report, by contrast, described a far broader form of surveillance, focused primarily on domestic phone-call records. Some of its elements have been disclosed before. The Los Angeles Times reported in December that AT&T provided the NSA with a "direct hookup" into a company database, code-named Daytona, that has been recording the telephone numbers and duration of every call placed on the AT&T network since 2001. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has sued AT&T over that and other alleged violations of privacy law, said the call database spans 312 terabytes, a quantity that would fill more than 400,000 computer compact discs.

Government access to call records is related to the previously disclosed eavesdropping program, sources said, because it helps the NSA choose its targets for listening. The mathematical techniques known as "link analysis" and "pattern analysis," they said, give grounds for suspicion that can result in further investigation." (Emphasis added.)

Now we can add this to our handy Bush administration translation manual: To any claim that the NSA surveillance program was narrowly tailored, add: "of course, this refers only to the actual eavesdropping. Coming up with the target list, which requires accessing the records of tens of millions of Americans, is part of another program entirely."

***

I also wanted to highlight this quote from Sen. Jon Kyl, about the program described in the USA Today article:

"This is nuts. We are in a war, and we've got to collect intelligence on the enemy. And you can't tell the enemy in advance how you're going to do it."

Knowing that Sen. Kyl regards tens of millions of Americans as "the enemy" certainly clarifies things.

***

Finally, handy links to some good articles on the legality of the program: Orin Kerr, Glenn Greenwald, Kate Martin. The consensus view seems to be that the program does not violate the Fourth Amendment, but either has "statutory problems" (Kerr), or is illegal (Martin.) The various statutes, which are above my pay grade, are discussed and linked to in these posts. One thing I do want to mention is this: I was watching CNN while I ate dinner, and various administration types were arguing that this did not violate FISA, since the NSA just gathered data about the calls, rather than actually listening in on them. As Glenn Greenwald points out, however, FISA defines 'electronic surveillance' as various ways of capturing the "contents" of communications, and it defines "contents" not, as one might expect, to mean what the people who are communicating are actually saying, but as follows:

"''Contents'', when used with respect to a communication, includes any information concerning the identity of the parties to such communication or the existence, substance, purport, or meaning of that communication." (Emphasis added.)

So I can't see any reason to think that the NSA program, as described in the USA Today story, does not fall under FISA, along with the other statutes mentioned in the various posts I linked to.

Comments

[KCinDC]

No doubt there'll be an attempt to say that phone numbers (with no names and addresses, as people keep stressing -- as if most of the numbers can't be connected to a name and address in seconds by anyone with web access) are not "information concerning the identity of the parties to such communication". Perhaps the word "existence" needs to be emphasized in the FISA definition as well.

[Steve]

The short version of the statutory argument, which is only slightly above my pay grade, is this:

We don't know all the operational details of the new program. But it's clear the NSA must be doing one of two things: Either they are engaging in real-time monitoring of who calls whom, with the cooperation of the telecoms, or else they are getting after-the-fact reports of who called whom.

If the former, it violates the federal "pen register" statute, a pen register being a "device or process which records or decodes dialing, routing, addressing, or signaling information transmitted by an instrument or facility from which a wire or electronic communication is transmitted."

If the latter is the case, then the telecoms are in violation of the federal Stored Communications Act, which prohibits the disclosure of records pertaining to wire communications to a government entity.

There are exceptions in both cases, of course, most notably if the government has a legal warrant. But it seems pretty clear that none of the exceptions were satisfied here.

I can't see any way that one of these statutes was not violated.

[Harald Korneliussen]

Observing who speaks with whom is known in the intelligence community as "traffic analysis". By any sane definition, when people are looking up who you are calling, they are spying on you.

I can't belive I'm reading this, it's insane! Just how many are being spied upon in this way? From the post at crooked timber on this I got the impression that it was all the telephone networks in the US except Qwest?! If they have observed even a fraction of that, you should stop being offended by your government. You should instead be very, very afraid of it.

[Harald Korneliussen]

"Known links" to al Quaeda and allies, he says. I wonder how many levels of linking he means? The call graph is so interconnected that I'd be suprised if even I hadn't called someone who called someone who called someone who could be suspected of having ties to al Quaeda.

[a]

"Knowing that Sen. Kyl regards tens of millions of Americans as "the enemy" certainly clarifies things."

Do you think that such stupid rhetoric actually does something to advance your cause, or to enhance your credibility?

[duaneg]

Do you think that such stupid rhetoric actually does something to advance your cause, or to enhance your credibility?

Well yes, stupid rhetoric like the senator's does a great deal to enhance the credibility of his critics.

[Ugh]

I grabbed one of my office's copies of USA Today from Thursday because I wanted to keep it due to the headline, which screams:

NSA HAS MASSIVE DATABASE OF AMERICANS' PHONE CALLS: 3 telecoms help government collect billions of domestic records.

The last time I did that was on 9/12/01 (though I eventually threw those out, as I imagine I will with this one).

[Catsy]

I think the most insightful comment from yesterday's thread was the person (whose comment I can't find at the moment) who pointed out that anything they glean from this is the fruit of the proverbial poisoned tree: is anyone under the illusion that they could take this illegally gained information and do anything... legal with it? What are they going to do, use it to get a court order?

The sheer volume of the defenses of this latest goal post move on the righty blogs is stunning. If this administration has done one positive thing, it's made it easy to tell which conservatives mean what they say when they talk about wanting smaller, less intrusive government, and which ones are dishonest hacks who don't need to be taken seriously anymore.

[Ugh]

is anyone under the illusion that they could take this illegally gained information and do anything... legal with it? What are they going to do, use it to get a court order?

I was under the impression that David Addington, who I think is/was the Veep's legal advisor, advocated just that: using illegally obtained evidence to obtain search warrants and convictions of suspects without telling the judge or the defendant. In fact it is this

[bob mcmanus]

A Different Kind of Impeachment ...sistersarlou at Next Hurrah disagrees about impeachment, but worries that a Rove indictment will distract from the terrible dangers of the NSA program

"What does bother me is the application of the NSA technology to Politics. We all know about New Hampshire Phone Blocking -- but what if Haley Barbour's firm got privileged access to the data base and could block all Democratic Get out the Vote calls -- or perhaps substitute phony ones? (Remember the New Hampshire midnight calls for Harlem Blacks for McGovern? -- not much of a stretch actually.) To be specific, have elements of the NSA Data Base been copied and shifted to alternative ownership or guardianship? This is something that must be high priority on the investigative list. For I don't think they were looking for Taliban Terrorists at all -- I think they were looking for networked Democrats. We all know how easy it is to take data from one server and post it on another -- well???? What if you then match it up with the voting registration list and act accordingly? We need to learn how to cast the potential evil into the public realm."

[Frank Wilhoit]

Again, it was instantly obvious to anyone who remembers the early 1970s that this entire scheme is simply the Huston plan. It has nothing to do with terrorism. It is exclusively focused on domestic opponents of the Republican Party, and it would have been done even without 9/11 .

Everything that we are now living through is Richard Nixon's revenge. If Nixon had gone to prison and broken some stone, we wouldn't have today's Republican Party, except as an underground cult with perhaps local power at the county level in a few places. But justice was not seen to be done, and here is the result. We got where we are by letting people off the hook--Nixon a crucial and conspicuous example, but many many others as well. From here on out, justice must be seen to be done.

(By the way, "smaller government" has always been a code phrase for placing one's friends above the law, and nothing more.)

[Slartibartfast]

For me, 'smaller government' has been codeword for 'smaller government'. If I'd known that for others it meant something quite different, I'd never have thought they represented me.

[bob mcmanus]

Oh, and if the righy blogs are defending this, well 10s of millions of records could have absolutely nothing to do with American-based terrorism. We have arrested how many terrorists on American soil? Less than a dozen?

We do not yet know the purpose of this database. We do know what it wasn't. It wasn't about terrorism.

[KCinDC]

An ABC News/Washington Post poll says Americans favor the NSA call tracking by 63 to 35 percent. The front-page headline on the ABC News site is "America: Go Ahead, Track Our Calls". The question, of course, doesn't even hint that the program might be illegal, but the results are disturbing nonetheless. The only bright spot is that people think the news media were right to disclose the program by 56 to 42 percent.

I think I can hear Specter's spine melting already.

I can't wait for the headline after the next revelation: "America: We're Scared! Bring On the Police State!"

[Anderson]

Orin Kerr has narrowed his analysis on the basis of yesterday's news reports, and now appears to find only one statute that seems to've been violated.

Leaving aside, of course, whether "legal" and "right" are the same thing in this case. "We're collecting all your call records, but it's okay, because it's ... not illegal!" does not sound like a winning campaign slogan.

[Ugh]

RE Justice dropping its NSA investigatino, I think Jack Cafferty put it best:

A secret government agency has told our Justice Department that it's not allowed to investigate it. And the Justice Department just says ok and drops the whole thing. We're in some serious trouble, boys and girls.

[socratic_me]

hilzoy said:
"Knowing that Sen. Kyl regards tens of millions of Americans as "the enemy" certainly clarifies things."

a said:
Do you think that such stupid rhetoric actually does something to advance your cause, or to enhance your credibility?

While I think that calling something stupid without arguing for why it is so generally reflects poorly on the commenter, not the thing he/she/it called stupid, this quote also jumped out at me as being conspicuously over-the-top.

When Sen. Kyle claims that you have to collect information on the enemy, he isn't claiming that all information obtained is about the enemy anymore than I would claim that rocks and hills and trees are my enemy when I go out to physically scout an enemy position. This analogy shouldn't be difficult to follow.

The question of whether or not this is a troubling trend really does hinge on whether or not you trust the government to treat us as rocks and trees and hills or whether you think those in power might use it against their enemies. Given that this administration has fought and continues to fight any and all attempts at oversight, I fall very readily into the camp that is distrustful. Given that this is a scheme that has been tried by this group of Republicans once already, and that we have already seen some odd phone-line behavior in Democratic groups during election time, that distrust is multiplied by a factor of 10.

[hilzoy]

a: what I said is what follows if you take Sen. Kyl at his word, and assume that he meant what he said. The alternative is that he is being completely disingenuous. I meant to make this clear using irony. If it failed, oh well.

Harald: ""Known links" to al Quaeda and allies, he says. I wonder how many levels of linking he means?" -- Yet another technical truth from the person who was supposed to free us from Clinton's parsing of 'is'. It now ranks second among my favorite examples, the first being: 'I don't have any plans to invade Iraq on my desk'. One is not supposed to have to ask: yeah, but what about on your bedtable, or in the To Do box?

[bob mcmanus]

Bad Guys ...digby on the enemies of the state to be included in databases

"The demonstration seemed harmless enough. Late on a June afternoon in 2004, a motley group of about 10 peace activists showed up outside the Houston headquarters of Halliburton, the giant military contractor once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. They were there to protest the corporation's supposed "war profiteering." The demonstrators wore papier-mache masks and handed out free peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches to Halliburton employees as they left work. The idea, according to organizer Scott Parkin, was to call attention to allegations that the company was overcharging on a food contract for troops in Iraq. "It was tongue-in-street political theater," Parkin says.

But that's not how the Pentagon saw it. To U.S. Army analysts at the top-secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), the peanut-butter protest was regarded as a potential threat to national security. Created three years ago by the Defense Department, CIFA's role is "force protection"—tracking threats and terrorist plots against military installations and personnel inside the United States. In May 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy Defense secretary, authorized a fact-gathering operation code-named TALON—short for Threat and Local Observation Notice—that would collect "raw information" about "suspicious incidents." The data would be fed to CIFA to help the Pentagon's "terrorism threat warning process," according to an internal Pentagon memo."

[Slartibartfast]

Completely beside the point, Halliburton actually made money last year; 11+% profit margin. The three-year average is still less than 1%, but at least it's on the black side.

[Anderson]

I say we give Halliburton the contract for detaining convicted Republicans from the Bush administration, and keep them in the black well into the century. (And I don't even own any of their stock.)

[xanax]

I was astonished (but, at this point, I'm not sure why) to read Trent Lott's comment in this morning's paper (sorry, can't find a link):

"Do we want security... or do we want to get in a twit about our civil libertarian rights?"

And speaking of "a twit"...

Wow.

[KCinDC]

Here's the story, xanax. The thing that surprises me is Lott's use of the word "libertarian". Maybe that'll wake up a few more of the self-proclaimed libertarians who keep voting Republican, but I doubt it.

[John Thullen]

Perhaps Lott should get his civil liberties insured by the same folks who insured his house. I like to place twits in good hands.

Another market-based solution to this quandary: citizens could trade in civil liberties futures; when you believe your civil liberties are going to decline, but you want to maintain your original position in Constitutional protections, you could short civil liberties futures contracts on the exchange.

If you are shipped to GITMO and stripped naked for the cavity search, you could short naked futures contracts. You would never be seen again, but you could leave your hedged winnings to your children. And, no death tax.

I'll give this idea a week before Kudlow embraces it as his own on CNBC (cackling and showing his poorly maintained teeth to the viewers). After all, it took the satire in the movie "Network" a decade or two before our corporate media embraced it as a business model.

[Gary Farber]

Bob, if you'd like to read about Talon, you could try this from December, this from January, and this and this.

For CIFA, we can go also back to 2003. I also linked in an aside in another, more recent, post to this by Arkin.

In case you or anyone is interested.

[radish]

For me, 'smaller government' has been codeword for 'smaller government'. If I'd known that for others it meant something quite different, I'd never have thought they represented me.

Well, yes, but then you're not exactly typical, are you? This is why we (for some definition of we) love (for some definition &c.) you, and also why we think you've been an "enabler" of the GOP who (we strongly suspect) would recoil in horror and devote yourself to disabling said organization if only you stepped back a few yards, gazed out over the landscape, and took in the true measure of the wreckage wrought thereby. All the groaning, eye-rolling, and caustic commentary should be seen in that context.

John Thullen, LOL... Humour is like coffee -- the blacker the better.

[socratic_me]

hilzoy-

I still do not see how your very very literal reading of Sen. Kyl's is the most obvious one. It certainly isn't a charitable reading in any way. That lack of charity in reading his claim makes it all too easy for those you are debating against to simply claim that liberals don't understand that when you are searching for terrorists, you sometimes have to search among people. There are many reasons to be bothered by this bill. The belief that Sen. Kyl sees all Americans as the enemy really isn't a terribly strong one.

[Ugh]

OT - Foggo's home and Langley office raided by FBI agents. But yeah, Goss left for completely unrelated reasons.

[john miller]

hilzoy, I find myself agreeing with socratic_me.

These guys give enough ammunition without going over the top. And I know that there was an element of snark in your statement.

However, Kyl is up for re-election, and his opponent can use these kind of statements.

This is all about 22 years past Orwell's timing, but it sure looks like Big Brother is coming to pass in a way beyond our worse nightmares.

Maybe a lot of Americans should read the old book It Can't Happen Here.

[Ugh]

Also OT: Jack Balkin depresses the hell out of me here.

[john miller]

Ugh, that was depressing, and frightening.

I almost wish you hadn't put in the link.

[Ugh]

john miller -

Sorry, have a drink, that's what I did.

[Gary Farber]

I don't want to pile on, but I thought your comment about Kyl was a bit silly, actually, I'm afraid, Hilzoy.

I think you know where I stand on these issues, but I don't think there's anything unclear about the rationale for the program (although, as I constantly do, I may be over-estimating what I think is obvious here).

What's in question here is the legality; how much additional effectiveness it might lend to searching for terrorists isn't something I could quantitatively address, but that it would have certain at least small and additive useful qualities should be obvious to anyone who knows as relatively little about pattern analysis, and a bunch of other technical jargon I could throw in without really knowing all that much about it, as I do, I should think. (Stuff like "B-tree indexing," "data dictionaries," "locking," "transactions," and other such stuff that "Daytona" is said to use, plus what I read about the algorithims of social transaction data, and so on and so forth; the stuff I linked to about Narus here, and so on and so forth.)

But the point of such traffic analysis and cross-comparisons of data is to find where the "enemy" might be hiding amongst the swarm/crowd. To do that, one has to look at the crowd.

I'm not speaking to the legality of this program in that regard, or defending it being done without Congressional or court or public approval, but it's entirely obvious what Kyl meant, and it was, setting aside the minor questions of right/wrong, legal/illegal, in that context, at least perfectly comprehensible. And it certainly didn't mean that anyone involved regards the population of the U.S. with phones as the enemy. That's just, well, silly.

Did you actually misunderstand him, rather than deliberately, well, pretend to do so for rhetorical purposes? Because the latter is kinda how it tended, I think, to look at first glance, though if you say that you simply literally didn't understand what he meant, I'll certainly take your word for it, of course.

But if you understood him, but were trying to be sarcastic, this is an extremely rare case on your part where I think that just didn't get off the ground, I'm afraid.

No biggie, though, and in fact quite trivial, and I'm sorta entirely borderline as to whether to hit "post" on this, as I'm afraid that I'm contributing to a pile-on, and to making an impression that a trivial line of yours was of any importance, since it was just a passing line by you.

[Gary Farber]

Oh, and to be clear -- I'd think this was, again, obvious, but to make sure that it is -- I think Kyl's statement on the substance, while perfectly comprehensible, was entirely stupid. Again, I don't believe that most members of al Queda are so stupid, ill-trained, and ignorant of tradecraft as to not be aware that they'd need to be aware of their use of phones, so I don't see that public discussion of this program tells them anything remotely helpful.

[bob mcmanus]

"And it certainly didn't mean that anyone involved regards the population of the U.S. with phones as the enemy."

And no one is talking about the "population of the U.S." Tens of millions does not equal everybody, or every phone. My guess the total number of phones approaches a billion.

So what group is in the "tens of millions" Middle Easterners on temporary visas? People of ME descent or origin? American Muslims? Nope. People who call Pakistan, Afghanistan, or Iraq? All the above combined? Nope.

Remember, not tens of millions of phone calls, but tens of millions of individuals.

[socratic_me]

On the off chance this wasn't clear in my post, I do think that Kyl's statement was stupid, for exactly the reasons Gary points out above. Just as I think that, without oversight, this program is begging to be abused.

On the other hand, with appropriate oversight, and an administration that actually believes in transparancy, I rather suspect I could live with it. At that point, the issue becomes kind of murky for me and really depends on how easy the oversight is to do an end around on.

[KCinDC]

... that it would have certain at least small and additive useful qualities should be obvious ...

I'm willing to accept that it could be useful, but I don't think it's obvious that it's a net positive. Any program involving analysis of such a huge number of people for something as rare as terrorism has a very high potential for identifying large numbers of false positives and thus wasting resources that might be used more effectively. There are certainly people who believe that the intelligence agencies' problem is less lack of data and more what they do with the data they have.

Also, I don't believe it's unreasonable to think that people may be seduced by the latest whizbang technological proposal that's supposed to magically solve their problems, even when it really doesn't.

Besides, even if the program does increase the chance of finding terrorists, it's possible that the increase isn't enough to offset the negative effects on society -- the damage to the innocent people erroneously identified as terrorists, the money spent that could have been spent elsewhere, the changes to society resulting from people knowing all this government monitoring is going on, and so on. As with most things, it's a tradeoff.

So while I agree that whether the program is legal is an important question, I don't think it's the only question.

And God forbid that Hilzoy should ever be "a bit silly"!

[bob mcmanus]

So what subset of the America population is more than say, 30 million, but much less than everybody?

[KCinDC]

I think you're getting carried away with the "tens of millions", Bob. My assumption is that the database includes all customers of the phone companies that cooperated. That number is probably less than 200 million (though perhaps not much less), so "hundreds of millions" would be incorrect, so the article said "tens of millions". What reason is there to believe the number is as low as 30 million?

[Gary Farber]

"Any program involving analysis of such a huge number of people for something as rare as terrorism has a very high potential for identifying large numbers of false positives and thus wasting resources that might be used more effectively."

Yes, that could be. But this is a question that's pretty much susceptible only to expert opinion, I'm afraid.

Not that experts can't be wrong; I'm just saying we're not in a position to be able to seriously judge the correct answer to that question, but merely to ask it, although it's an entirely valid question.

I agree with the rest of your points, KCinDC.

[socratic_me]

And God forbid that Hilzoy should ever be "a bit silly"!

I guess I can only speak for myself on this, but I am willing to raise an issue like this with hilzoy for two reasons. One is that I feel it is a legitimate complaint, which this site should encourage and not shy away from just because someone has earned silly-credit.

The other is actually a much bigger deal to me. Hilzoy has earned tons of respect from me for all of the amazing research and posting she does here, as well as her expansive responses in comments. It is primarily because I respect her writing so much that I am willing to point out where I feel one part of her post hurts the rest of it by being of lesser quality. I hope I never see the day where my expectations of her writing have been lowered so much that I would just let it past with a "ho-hum, that is just to be expected from hilzoy sometimes"

[Gary Farber]

"My assumption is that the database includes all customers of the phone companies that cooperated."

My assumption is that it includes every bit of data they can get their paws on. My assumption is also that, as I've written about countless times since December, lastly here (tangentially here), anyone who believes that this only involves phone numbers is simply unbelievably naive.

But the point is to, indeed, target everybody; the larger the field, the more effective, and the smaller the field, the less effective. And don't forget that this is at the switch level, as well.

But if anyone things the NSA hasn't also gone for access to every commercial databank they can get their fingers on, every credit card databank, every supermarket databank, every every databank, well, I suggest they're not very familiar with NSA practices and history and approach.

I predicted out this week's "revelations" as coming months ago. I've also predicted the above. I'm wrong about things from time to time (hey, I thought that West Wing was going to make Arnold Vinick the Veep nominee, and I didn't think the Bushies would screw up Iraq remotely as much as they did), and I could be wrong in this, but I bet a nickel I'm not.

[KCinDC]

Well, maybe there'll be more news next week, Gary (though maybe it'll just be more things you've already posted about months ago -- I really would read Amygdala more often if it didn't take so long to load for me).

[Gary Farber]

"I really would read Amygdala more often if it didn't take so long to load for me"

Loads in under 30 seconds for me. ObWi is consistently much slower for me. But if you have any suggestions as to anything I can do to help, they're certainly welcome.

I saw the stuff about Tice early today, but decided "something may be said next week" wasn't worth doing a blog entry on. I did do a whole post about him back in January, and quoted him being quoted again in Februrary, so I figured I'd wait until he actually had something new to say to blog about him yet again.

[bob mcmanus]

"I think you're getting carried away with the "tens of millions", Bob." ...kc

Ok, the original article says everything. The problem is that "tens of millions" is a small number. As is the "less than 200 million". I would guess that most people have been including cell phone accounts, but I don't know if people here have been considering business accounts.

I don't know how many phones are at the multi-acre Texas Instruments Complex north of Dallas. I don't know if Verizon or whomever would consider that one account. I am guessing safely that a record is kept of calls at each individual phone, or number. I know somebody looking at my household would need about a half-dozen records.

I would guess that the number of separate phone records would run into the billions.

[KCinDC]

Bob, the USA Today article starts, "The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans." The number of phones doesn't enter into it -- there could be hundreds of millions involved.

I don't think the phone companies have fields in their databases for religion or country of origin or immigration status, so I find it much more likely that they handed over the whole shebang, rather than had the NSA give them a database of some set of tens of millions of phone numbers for them to export the data for. The NSA isn't going to go out of its way to avoid getting data.

[KCinDC]

A bit of evidence that the NSA's use of technology doesn't always lead to greater efficiency.

[Gary Farber]

"A bit of evidence that the NSA's use of technology doesn't always lead to greater efficiency."

Well, of course not. The incident in which their entire system was down for days is very famous to anyone even slightly familiar with the NSA, after all.

[Harald Korneliussen]

Catsy, the kind of information gained from network analysis will usually be circumstantial. If they do only what they say they do, they can make very good guesses at where to start looking for useful evidence of terrorist activity.

But I don't think that's what they are doing. While such a database could indeed be a powerful tool against terrorism, it would be a lot more powerful against the opposition at home, which is much larger, much more of an immediate problem for the government, and which isn't quite so distrustful of the phone networks. And remember, they are skipping the warrants process. Even though they are easy to get, and can even be had after the fact, they skip them. That alone would be pretty damning evidence that they are looking at things they shouldn't.