NSA domestic spying is legally predicated on a 1974 purse snatch?!

[thewayne]

Interesting story. Guy steals woman's purse, then begins stalking her. She recognizes his car in the neighborhood, tells a cop, they get a district attorney to issue a subpoena to the phone company for a pen recording on the guy's phone line. Snatcher is arrested, sentenced to a decade in prison. Appeals ultimately to the Supreme Court that the phone calls were protected info under the 4th Amendment, SCOTUS says it ain't and that any records transmitted to a business are not protected.

Thus all Americans and most people around the world get spied upon wholesale by the United States government.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/10/nsa-smith-purse-snatching/

Comments

[silveradept]

...any port in a storm, I suppose. Still, the indiscriminate surveillance of the population surely violates the Fourth anyway, right?