After 9/11, the Bush administration went to the FISA court to expand its surveillance efforts considerably. Judges asked the Bush gang for two things: to name a target and give a reason to spy on it. The administration balked. In case there was any doubt, the New York Times explains why.
The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.
The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system’s main arteries, they said.
As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.
The White House wanted to go fishing, and our domestic telecoms provided the pond. When Bush described this as a limited program that target international calls of suspected terrorists, that apparently wasn’t … what’s the word … true.
As the NYT explains, the NSA eavesdropped without warrants on specific conversations, but also utilized telecom “switches” to “comb through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.”
As Kevin noted, this is all a very impressive use of technology, which also appears to be illegal.
It’s why Bush couldn’t get and didn’t want warrants for his program. FISA courts would have approved any call the administration wanted to tap, even retroactively, and Congress would have approved changes to FISA to strengthen the president’s surveillance hand. But the White House had data mining, not specific conversations, on its mind.