@ David: The legislation usually invoked in foreign wiretapping cases is FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillence Act). The act was expanded by the Patriot Act to include monitoring of terrorist activity approved by a court(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Act). However, no court applies if there are no U.S. citizens involved in the exchange, so my sense is that foreign citizens can be tapped as long as the President wants them to be.Regarding US citizens, though, the FBI is allowed to wiretap based on acceptance by a judge (first approved by the Attorney General) so long as it suspects a wide range of crimes(http://www2.law.cornell.edu/uscode/uscode18/usc_sec_18_00002516----000-.html). Unfortunately, we only have to look at the Church Committee reports, such as this one on the FBI wiretapping Martin Luther King, Jr,(large PDF file explaining the whole thing: http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book3/pdf/ChurchB3_2_MLK.pdf). ) to see how this kind of oversight can be ignored or abused...
(an update later)
Saturday, May 12, 2007
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RE right to privacy: The Supreme Court found in 1967's Katz v. United States that a person's conversations are protected by the fourth amendment (law is at http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=389&invol=347 with a simple summary at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katz_v._United_States ).
Now, if an intelligence agency gets a court order, then everything is "reasonable" and they can snoop all they want. But if it's easier for the FBI to wiretap, it makes sense for them to seek more court orders. Thus, privacy concerns.