Hello Richard,
Electronic-ease-dropping has taken place for over a decade, but over the last 7 years or so, supercomputers have been deployed software that will collect and correlate the sender's name, location of call, any criminal data, or directed watch directives, facial data, voice print, actual call routing, AND the same for the receiver of the call or message. It will correlate much of this info based on freq. of contacts or locations of either. They will do predictive analysis for movements. Field commanders and CIA/FBI agents have access to the predictive elements and other information. Messages are read by supercomputers and interpreted based on the subjects metadata. Such analyses have resulted in many terrorist interceptions.

If you are interested in this subject, I highly recommend reading "Counterstrike" by Schmidt and others.

--Tim

Fourth Amendment

The Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution protects citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures. The Fourth Amendment states, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

The purpose of the Fourth Amendment is to uphold the privacy and security of individual persons against subjective invasions by the government and its officials. When the government violates an individual’s “expectation of privacy”, then an unlawful search has occurred. An individual’s “expectation of privacy” can be defined as whether the individual expects their actions will be free from government intrusion.

The Fourth Amendment requires that searches meet a “reasonableness standard.” Reasonableness can weighted on the circumstances surrounding the search and by measuring the search’s overall intrusive nature against the legitimate interests of the government. A search will be unreasonable any time the government cannot prove that it was necessary. The government must show that there was “probable cause” for a search to be deemed “Constitutional”.

Don't fall off your chair in front of the computer, but although I have supported Obama in many things, here's where I cannot. That Verizon's phone data (and probably that of every other phone company) about you is being collected by the government. Hey, you conservatives, which side on this one do you take -- that in the interests of security we should monitor everyone's phone calls without probably cause, or that this is a disgrace ? I would love to know how you feel about this rape of privacy.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/06/06

As with any issue there are always two sides so here's my take - you can, of course, take it or leave it.

Terrorists often communicate using cell phones... we know that. We also know that if we get a tip and then wait for "probable cause" to kick in, the bomb will have already exploded leaving who knows how many dead.

So, for this issue and this issue only, I throw probable cause out the window. Using this method, I read today, one possible act of terror was stopped because the agency caught the information before the bad guys had a chance to do their damage. Had they waited for probable cause, the bomb would have exploded before the good guys, that's us, could even act on it.

Probable cause is important in general day to day law enforcement. However for this issue it's not - not in my opinion anyway.

Besides I'd ask, if you have a conversation that's so private that you want absolutely no one to hear it then do it face to face. That's how most terrorists do it now days - face to face.