<story><title>Secret Court&apos;s Redefinition of &apos;Relevant&apos; Empowered Vast NSA Data-Gathering</title><url>http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424127887323873904578571893758853344-lMyQjAxMTAzMDAwODEwNDgyWj.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rayiner</author><text>The article is methodologically misguided on a key point:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The history of the word &amp;#x27;relevant&amp;#x27; is key to understanding that passage. The Supreme Court in 1991 said things are &amp;#x27;relevant&amp;#x27; if there is a &amp;#x27;reasonable possibility&amp;#x27; that they will produce information related to the subject of the investigation. In criminal cases, courts previously have found that very large sets of information didn&amp;#x27;t meet the relevance standard because significant portions—innocent people&amp;#x27;s information—wouldn&amp;#x27;t be pertinent.&lt;p&gt;As a general rule, words have to be interpreted in the context of the laws that use them, because the same word can have different connotations in different laws. To use a programming analogy, talking about what &amp;quot;relevant&amp;quot; means in the law is like talking about what &amp;quot;num_files&amp;quot; means in programming. You can get a very general idea from the text, but you don&amp;#x27;t really know what the term means without looking at the rest of the source.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Relevant&amp;quot; means different things in the law. The article cites the narrow definition used in criminal search cases, but the Patriot Act is about foreign intelligence, not criminal prosecutions. In the law of evidence, for example, &amp;quot;relevant&amp;quot; is extremely broad: anything that could change whether some material fact is more or less likely to be true. You can&amp;#x27;t take the Supreme Court&amp;#x27;s interpretation of &amp;quot;relevant&amp;quot; in one case and apply it to the interpretation of the Patriot Act, just as you can&amp;#x27;t take a variable name in one program and assume it means the same thing in another program.</text></comment>
<story><title>Secret Court&apos;s Redefinition of &apos;Relevant&apos; Empowered Vast NSA Data-Gathering</title><url>http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424127887323873904578571893758853344-lMyQjAxMTAzMDAwODEwNDgyWj.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jdp23</author><text>The sourcing is &amp;quot;current and former administration and congressional officials&amp;quot;.  As with the New York Times article on the FISA Court&amp;#x27;s secret body of law, it&amp;#x27;s interesting to me that people are discussing this with the press.  Are the current administration officials talking with permission?&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;In classified orders starting in the mid-2000s, the court accepted that &amp;quot;relevant&amp;quot; could be broadened to permit an entire database of records on millions of people, in contrast to a more conservative interpretation widely applied in criminal cases, in which only some of those records would likely be allowed, according to people familiar with the ruling....&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Two senators on the Intelligence Committee, Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) and Mark Udall (D., Colo.), have argued repeatedly that there was a &amp;quot;secret interpretation&amp;quot; of the Patriot Act. The senators&amp;#x27; offices tell the Journal that this new interpretation of the word &amp;quot;relevant&amp;quot; is what they meant.&lt;/i&gt;</text></comment>