And that's all fine and good, but there are some logistical questions. For one, I believe FISA is a 9 member court (maybe 11, but I believe 9). And there are terrorists and suspected terrorists all over the world. And they call into the United States a lot. Thus there are thousands upon thousands of these phone calls, which would raise the question whether it is reasonable to believe that a 9 member court could look at and weigh all of these warrant requests, and give them enough time to make the right decision?
This question is intensified by this, apparantly most of the time when the phone tapping occurs, it is uncertain where exactly it is going, and thus it is unknown whether or not it is going to a foreign number, in which case a warrant would be unneccisary, or to a domestic number, in which case a warrant would be neccisary. Since going into the tapping it is unknown whether or not it will even fall under the FISA court's jurisdiction, it is impossible in many of these cases. Thus there is the 48 hours. For this to work the FISA court would be required to review all of these warrant requests in a ridiculously small amount of time, which would only make the issue I raised before, as I said, more intense.
I believe that checks on presidential authority are essential, and I believe that it says grave things about the Bush administration that, instead of adressing these problems before a closed session of congress, he just didn't mention it, and got all ****in indignant when he was called out on it. But that being said, saying you're entirely opposed to warrantless wiretapping means that you, at least to a certain degree, want to cut our intelligence agencies's balls off, since warrants, as we understand them, would mean either a 9 man court would have to work at an inhuman pace, or not give the warrants an improper amount of time and consideration (which makes the entire process of getting warrants pointless), or the intelligence agencies simply could not tap as many phones as are neccisary. Thus the fundamental idea behind warrants, for issues like this, has to change for us to succeed, and thus if we are to succeed, just about all of our wiretapping is going to have to be "warrantless".
Thoughts?
