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 --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo@metzdowd.com ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE