Mr. Bush and his senior aides have emphasized since the disclosure of the program's existence last week that the president's executive order applied only to cases where one party on a call or e-mail message was outside the United States.
Whether it's parents tracking children, or employers tracking employees, it's difficult to have pure consent where one party is dependent on the other.
Courts can only rule on actual cases where one party has concretely harmed another.
"There are all kinds of transactions going on out there where one party doesn't understand it," Richard M. Kovacevich, the chief executive of Wells Fargo, said in an interview yesterday.
He quoted the CEO of Wells Fargo Bank this way: "There are all kinds of transactions going on out there where one party doesn't understand it".
It is of course good news that Burma and several Arab countries are moving away from systems where one party kept a monopoly on power.
There has been a significant amount of unhappiness relative to Obama's inexperience and penchant for trying to develop policy and move society forward on the basis of consensus; a consensus where one party refuses to make while the other party makes all the significant concessions at the risk of totally alienating its base of supporters.
But in practice, presidential candidates tend to ignore states where one party already dominates, such as California, Texas and New York, and instead focus on the half-dozen states that are deemed to be "battlegrounds" where either party might prevail.
"What tends to happen in these cases is that an agreement will be met with regards to cross-licensing, where one party agrees to licence something in return for access to another". On the Taiwanese stock exchange, shares in HTC closed up 5% at 495 Taiwanese dollars (£10, $15).
The course then evolves to two-party decision situations where one party has more information than the other.
Such negotiation is usually done in terms of matching offers, where one party promises to pay a certain amount if others pay a certain amount.
