Can we get on the same factual page about what the govt is (admitting to) doing?

[Recursion]

There seems to be a lot of variance here. Here is my understanding of what the government admits it is doing.

(This is not a thread about whether these are good or bad things. I just want to make sure we're all talking about the same stuff.)

1. (See edited note below!) Pursuant to a regular rubber-stamp type warrant ("please let us monitor everything&quot , tracking the origins and destinations of phone calls and Internet traffic, pretty much universally, to look for patterns they don't like. The government's claim as I'm understanding it is that this is happening but does not look at the content of the calls/emails/transmissions/whatever, but that they are happening between point A and point B.

2. Upon finding those patterns, applying for an additional warrant to pursue that information further and look at the rest of whatever information they slurped up about that transmission. This pass does look at content.

3. As a factual question, nobody has said whether or not the data used in step 2 is actually present already in step 1. We don't know, but if it is present, the government's claim is that it doesn't use it. Step 2 may involve new data collection, or may involve looking at parts of the data from Step 1 that were not being examined before.

Does anyone have any sources for me that contradict these three statements, or add relevant information to them?

(Please: there are a million threads to decry or defend this system. I'm just trying to get at what we can with some reliability say is actually happening.)

EDITING:

I am no longer convinced that 1 applies to all data. Everything I'm seeing today says it applies only to specific FISA targets.

[alfie]

1. Well, it is my opinion

that you are trying to take the fun out of this. If we agree on anything, our outrage with each other will be significantly reduced and much of the anger will go away. Can't have that on DU.



I apologize for hijacking your thread with the dreaded . You have a very sensible post and I hope you achieve your objective.

[Recursion]

2. Welcome to DU!

[sofa king]

3. Some observations.

One commonly used term for point 1) is traffic analysis. The Germans were unusually good at it during World War II and often had a day or two of tactical warning as encoded radio traffic began to converge upon the enemy's jump-off point. They couldn't read the messages but they could track the movement.

But having said that, I seriously doubt that's the primary way the information is used.

I think one primary way all that data would be used is to start with one person, assume that person is guilty of something, treat all of America as suspects and any direct contacts as potential co-conspirators, treat all those co-conspirators as mere cut-outs for still another level of potential co-conspirators, and so on.