PEN REGISTER

I had never heard of Pen Register until tonight when I was fortunate enough to listen to an Assistant US Attorney describe some of the steps she and other Federal law enforcement agencies used to roll-up and throw in jail a number of extremely bad men who had abused their position of public trust for private gain. You know, sort of like Diane Feinstein or Harry Reid.

As described, it sounded like they launched their investigation into massive bribery and 'pay-to-play' in the County by implementing Pen Register on selected politicians they thought might be involved and recording the phone number information of every call they made over many months and then used processes such as reverse dial-up to identify the phone numbers called and used that (meta data) to justify requesting court orders for multiple wire taps.

The taps were installed and then monitored for 9 months and the results gained were used to convict a number of crooks and thieves politicians. I can feel quite good about the result even if I question the methods. I could get behind them and push though if all district attorneys and all US Attorneys and the Justice Department didn't reliably ignore the obvious guilt of so many politicians. Abuse of the Public Trust is a vile crime. We all know how John Kerry became a millionaire. He did it the old fashioned way and married a rich woman.

While searching the tubes for more information about Pen Register I found a fascinating quote on the process but then realized that the source was a leaked document put on the web by the Guardian after they got it from Snowden and not a formally released document. Oh well. We don't use leaked documents around here.

It was a fascinating talk this evening and just one of many we heard tonight.