I was thinking that if the supposed call from Trayvon Martin to his friend on the night he was killed had actually happened, the prosecutors might want to have it to compare with the voices on the 911 call as well as to verify that he was terrified of the man who was following him.
In the interests of justice one wonders whether the NSA would cough up subpoena’d recordings, or even admit they have them.
One heck of a court case, I should think.
Is there any reason to think they have them? I haven’t been following the PRISM thing very carefully, but I’m pretty sure the accusation there is that they’re shifting through meta-data provided by phone companies, not that they’re bulk recording every call in the US.
As for meta-data, the court can (and presumably have) just supeona that directly from the phone companies. Or just look at Martin’s phone.
The problem there is that the phone companies typically destroy that information something like 90 days after the fact. The NSA apparently keeps it forever (and in fact one of the NSA’s prime arguments why it needs that data is because the phone companies don’t retain it long enough).
I vaguely remember reading something on one of the newswebs that one attorney has already begun such an attempt to get metadata from the NSA concerning his client’s cellphone records, on the basis that his client, who is accused of murder, was nowhere near the scene of the crime when it happened and his cellphone data will support that claim. One problem here is that the metadata the NSA collects/retains may not include information on the location of cellphones, just the calls they make/receive.
The article predicted there would be a floodgate of similar requests before long.