The episode's title, "The Private Life of Deer," suggests that we have finally gotten the goods on these omnipresent beasts by wiretapping them or some such and can now toss them in prison for, say, tax evasion, much as the Treasury Department did with Al Capone.
It wiretapped them, overhearing a protected conversation with a defense attorney.
In 2005, the New York Times reported that President George W. Bush had secretly, and deliberately, authorized the NSA to violate the rights of American citizens by wiretapping them without a legally required warrant from the FISA Court.
Bamford writes with stinging skepticism about the legal procedures created in 1978 under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to adjudicate spying — the same laws that, since 9/11, have allowed for domestic wiretapping — calling them "a super hush-hush surveillance court that is virtually impotent".
The Second Circuit decision will prove to be important in future cases because it frees up prosecutors to seek a wiretap without requiring them to defer to an S.E.C. investigation.
That means that it had the authority to wiretap, to surveil them, to clone their computer hard drives — every single thing you can imagine, it had the authority to do.
But he wrote that the investigation had already learned that senior department attorneys reviewed only the summaries of applications to make sure that they met the legal standard for a wiretap before submitting them to a judge – not the underlying affidavits and other details of a case.
Although the authorities had testimony accusing Mr. Bergrin of providing both the inducement and identity that led to Mr. McCray's killing, the case could not be prosecuted after a judge ruled — and the prosecutors acknowledged — that they mishandled the wiretap tapes, rendering them inadmissible as evidence.
He may end up spending the rest of his life in prison, but Mr. Pellicano still wants the jury to know two things -- one, he was the brilliant mind behind telesleuth and two, no matter whether he wiretapped people, threatened them or simply gave them the evil eye, he helped his clients win.
