Why did Bush order the NSA to do the illegal wiretaps in question? Any fool can tap a phone. Literally. Liddy did them for Nixon. So why was the NSA included in the loop of illegal acts? What tool does the NSA have that nobody else has that would force Bush to turn to the NSA?
The NSA has ECHELON. What's the big deal about Echelon? Echelon monitors ALL the communications of a geographic region it's targeted upon. That probably means Bush ordered all communications within the US monitored by the NSA and their Echelon system.
"...According to intelligence experts in the United States and Europe, a massive electronic intercept program called Project Echelon scans all Internet traffic, cell phone conversations, faxes, and long-distance telephone calls--virtually every type of electronic communication--looking for evidence of terrorist activity, military threats, and transnational crime.
The e-spying is being conducted by the secretive U.S. National Security Agency and its counterparts in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom...."
"...Echelon uses a filtering process to flag messages with keywords such as bomb, gun, and militia. But because little is known about Echelon, it remains unclear whether the system can differentiate between messages sent by criminals and those sent by law-abiding citizens. For example, a person in Chicago might innocently use two or more of the keywords in an e-mail to a friend in Japan while describing a Tom Clancy novel, or while discussing the latest NYPD Blue episode, or even a news report about a recent terrorist act. What happens when Echelon picks up such a message? No one knows.
If you're a typical user, your chances of coming to the attention of a live person at the NSA--much less of being placed under more thorough surveillance as part of an investigation--are tiny. But nevertheless, the NSA has cast a very wide net to catch just a few suspicious goldfish. And the agency is invading your privacy to do it.
Project Echelon's equipment can process 1 million message inputs every 30 minutes, according to a series of reports commissioned by the Scientific and Technological Options Assessment program, a research wing of the European Parliament.
The STOA studies finds the system filters intercepted material so minutely that only ten inputs out of 1 million are passed along for detailed analysis--which is likely a second level of software filtering. Even fewer messages reach live analysts.
The system also reportedly uses voiceprint technology to search telephone communications for targeted speakers.
Echelon uses powerful search engines--called dictionaries--to ferret out keywords of interest to intelligence analysts. Only a handful of these keywords from the classified dictionaries have made their way into published reports about the program...."
"...Echelon is so hush-hush that the NSA will not even acknowledge the program's existence, much less discuss its targeting criteria or its civil liberties safeguards. Only two fragmentary documents have been released under the federal Freedom of Information Act; they consist of just seven highly censored pages...."
http://www.pcworld.com/...
ECHELON is designed to monitor all of the communications in a target country. IMHO, the only reason Bush went to the NSA was to get the NSA to start monitoring all US communications with ECHELON.
Bush did not tap some phones. Bush tapped ALL the phones.