Quote:
Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
how did you hear the words? they have 1700 people to listen to already. they don't need to churn the file. some low grade "hit" wouldn't justify this, and surely wouldn't justify have bush sign his name 30 times, unless something more was there.
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Ignoring the factual inaccuracies in your post which others have pinted out --
RT's scenario is not that far-fetched, Hank.
The NSA monitors communications in just about every foreign country on the planet. Remember that foreign SIGINT is a core part of the NSA mission. They only have done domestic SIGINT for counter-espionage, and now counter-terror operations.
The NSA's work is computer-driven, and certainly includes monitoring based on the appearance of certain terms in communications as well as a "constellation of other factors." That is how the actual people choose which of the automatically-gathered communications to review in addition to the existing focused targets. Without such programs, the task would be impossible.
Plus, you seem to discount the idea that the government sought to cast a very wide web after 9/11. I'd suspect that they did.
The 1700 people you suggest (which I assume you're drawing from a yearly no. of FISA approvals) is chicken-feed when you're talking about monitoring the security of a nation with roughly 300 million citizens, tens of millions of legal and illegal aliens, and millions of visitors at any given time.
S_A_M
