Let's Be Clear, say Legal Experts, What NSA Is Doing Is 'Criminal'

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63. I think it is becoming clear how the FISA court acts.

First there are the warrants that are used to acquire metadata from the various corporations. But there are also individual warrants to monitor individual communications.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about the order of things. The analysts can look at anything in their database (which includes recordings of all our conversations and emails) with little or no oversight. I think it works something like this:

1) Yes, they do need a separate warrant in order to access content of individual phone calls/emails.

2) Yes, the analyst has legal authority to access content of individual phone calls/emails of anyone, on his own, without first getting a separate warrant.

These are consistent statements. The FISA law allows 72 hours after the fact to seek the warrant.

My understanding is that the analyst has legal access, on his own authority, once he has been verbally authorized by either the Attorney General or the Director of National Intelligence. I think the analyst only need fill out a form in order to take a peek at anything.

At least this is my current understanding of the law and the policy. These analysts, once verbally approved, might might be compared to the robosigners we found in the banking fraud.

There is one important difference; unlike the illegal robosigners for the banks, Congress, the Adminstration, and the Courts all seem to have made this process perfectly legal.

If you start to parse the Q&A information with this timeline in mind, it starts to reveal an amazing consistency. Many of the contradictory claims evaporate.