It superseded the stringent privacy provisions of the cable act, for example, by specifying that in many cases government agencies can use the more relaxed traditional wiretap process to get personal information.
His language grew harsher this week, as he lay the blame for some 40 lawsuits pending against the phone companies over the National Security Agency's wiretapping operation on class-action lawyers who were riding the "financial gravy train" and compromising national security in the process.
"Having labored as a police reporter in the days before the Patriot Act, I can assure all there has always been a stage before the wiretap, a preliminary process involving the capture, retention and analysis of raw data," Mr. Simon wrote.
Over the course of several hours, Holder pledged to end the practice of waterboarding, review the process of warrantless wiretapping, and end politicization of the Justice Department.
So the problem doesn't seem to have been wiretaps that were illegitimate in the first place, but wiretaps that shortcut the legal process and may have been illegal.
They also assert that the technology is like a wiretap, and that therefore the relatively difficult process of obtaining an electronic communications wiretap order, known in law enforcement as a "Title III" order, should have been followed, instead of the more basic search warrant procedure.
Shimon Ben Reuven, head of computer science at the Stein University, goes public with his suspicions of positive prejudice in examinations, favouring Israeli soldiers over Palestinians, but stumbles across the wiretap listening post in the process.
But John Wadham, director of Liberty, a civil-rights pressure group, points out that the public is unlikely to have confidence in wiretap evidence without a legally-based process of authorisation.
The foreign surveillance court and the court of review were established under a 1978 law that was intended to impose a formal court process on the approval of wiretaps in national-security investigations.
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.
