Just found this interesting piece over on Froggy Ruminations. Froggy (aka Matthew Heidt), as the name implies, is a former SEAL operator, and a current LEO. As someone who knows what he’s talking about, and as a Mil-Blogger, he is no doubt unknown to most of the denizens here.

Froggy relates back to his very first blog posting, in which he described a SOCOM raid on Ansar al Islam terrorist camp in Iraq. This raid yielded the name, address, and telephone number of a Muslim cleric in Albany New York who was subsequently wire-tapped and otherwise surveilled under a FISA warrant.

Unexpectedly finding the phone number and address of an American cleric at a terrorist compound in Iraq would seem to be a pretty good pretext for opening a case up on that mosque and that cleric. As such, I suspect that the phone number was at some point wiretapped with the use of a warrant presented before the FISA Court, monitored, and a UC operation was launched in order to obtain evidence suitable for the 19 indictments that eventually followed. This sequence of events is appropriate under the circumstances under which the initial information was obtained as there were no discernable time constraints, and the targets of the investigation (by using the discovered address) could be immediately placed under surveillance. There was no need and additionally no evidence for the use of a warrantless intercept.

So this is an example of battlefield intel feeding back into domestic law enforcement via FISA. But the topic at hand are those cases which are warrantless…

Assuming that the Ansar al Islam phone book contained foreign (OCONUS) phone numbers, names and addresses, a much different investigative track would have to be followed. The NSA has the authority and the responsibility to monitor ANY communications originating outside the US that might contain threats to US national security. The foreign phone numbers would have been placed on a priority monitoring status, and archives would have been searched to determine if those numbers had been monitored in the past.

No warrants would be required as the numbers are foreign; additionally, due to the foreign locations and languages adequate surveillance could not be initiated so the electronic monitoring and perhaps satellite reconnaissance would be the ONLY tools available to follow these potentially critical leads. With respect to the monitoring of calls from those foreign numbers to US persons, the only way to obtain FISA warrants PRIOR TO the initiation of any of those potential calls would be if a list of PREVIOUSLY called numbers in the US could be determined. Calls made from the foreign numbers to US numbers not previously known (it is tradecraft SOP to periodically change these numbers on both ends) could never be monitored under the absurd “interpretation” of the Constitution by liberals in the US Senate.

So essentially what the liberals are saying is that the US should not monitor calls from known terrorists abroad to previously unknown US co-conspirators under any circumstances.
They are proposing in essence that only calls to terrorist co-conspirators who are well known and under surveillance already can be monitored. The idea that the US should put its fingers in its own ears and repeat, “I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you!” when terrorists communicate with their agents in the US is one of the most ridiculous and silly ideas that I have ever heard. Members of the Frogosphere already know that Democrats cannot be trusted with the security of the United States, but this highly political stance cannot be mistaken as anything other than the utterly irresponsible and laughably weak gesture that it is.