Matt Blaze: Domestic Surveillance and Warrantless Wiretaps

Those familiar with Computer Security will recognize the name Matt Blaze, he's a well-respected researcher in the field. This is from a post to the [Cryptography] mailing list:

Subject: Domestic surveillance and warrantless wiretaps
Date: Sat, 27 Dec 2008 14:21:14 -0500
From: Matt Blaze <mab (@) crypto.com>
To: Cryptography <cryptography (@) metzdowd.com>

Like many people, I found last week's Newsweek cover piece, revealing Thomas M.
Tamm as the principal source for James Risen and Eric Lichtblau's 2005 NY Times
story that broke the warrantless wiretap story, to be a riveting read.

But I actually found a sidebar to the story even more interesting. That story
talks about the now famous 2004 incident at Ashcroft's hospital bed in which
several top DoJ officials threatened to resign. It turns out that was not about
warrantless content  collection, but rather about the wholesale collection of
call records:

   http://www.newsweek.com/id/174602/output/print

This story raises a number of new -- and ultimately quite disturbing --
questions about the nature of the wiretap program and the extent of its reach
into the domestic communication of innocent Americans.  In particular, put
together with other reports about the program, it seems to corroborate claims
that telcos (including my alma matter AT&T) provided the NSA with wholesale
access to domestic call detail records, and that top DoJ officials worried
seriously that this violated the law.

I discuss the implications of this in more detail on my blog; perhaps some here
will find it interesting:

     http://www.crypto.com/blog/metatapping

-matt