But it's also a history lesson, and as it jumps from subject to subject — the Afghan-Russian war, the birth of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, torture, wiretapping — what comes to mind are the many news programs and documentaries that have covered this material with much greater depth (and less authorial self-regard).
"If they're up on a wiretap, at what point do they not have the right to listen to union activity?" he asked of prosecutors and investigators.
Erdoğan's son Bilal also came under suspicion, after a wiretap captured what was alleged to be a conversation between him and his father.
What's your take on the debate over the Bush Administration's program of warrant-free wiretapping and what it means for civil liberties?
Right now, the rules Congress set 50 years ago to regulate wiretap orders prohibit what's called "judge shopping"; police in New York seeking to wiretap, for example, can't turn to a judge in Texas who's more willing to grant their request.
Under C.I.A. pressure, Malaysian authorities had conducted a surveillance of the gathering, turning up a number of faces but, in the absence of wiretaps, nothing of what was said.
Many rank-and-file officers think of him as overzealous and resent his use of wiretaps to vanquish what many officers saw as an acceptable custom: tearing up traffic tickets for friends and family of other officers.
The process is the opposite of what "wiretapping" used to mean in the popular imagination: alligator clips on a single wire that got you exactly the phone line you wanted to monitor.
They don't know, because they didn't even bother to find out who got wiretapped and for what reason.
I was wrong, they say, to suggest that the PAA did not really broaden wiretapping authority beyond what FISA had authorized since 1978.
