Here is the other shoe. How does NSA know which calls to tap? do they use a Ouija board? is it faith-based? of course not.....the answer is elementary.
They probably tap them all. There is no other way.
Furthermore,
this is the reason why Bush is hellbent on violating the law. The detection of the "connection to al Qaeda" etc occurs only AFTER the wiretap. Capeche?
The Boston Globe has the story:
The National Security Agency, in carrying out President Bush's order to intercept the international phone calls and e-mails of Americans suspected of links to al-Qaida, has probably been using computers to monitor all other Americans' international communications as well, according to specialists familiar with the workings of the NSA.
After acquiring the data, they probably then use computer algorithms to screen for cerrtain words, phrases, and relationships (as if the bad guys are gonna just come out and use the "wrong" words.).
MORE BELOW
The Bush administration and the NSA have declined to provide details about the program the president authorized in 2001, but specialists said the agency serves as a vast data collection and sorting operation. It captures reams of data from satellites, fiber-optic lines and Internet switching stations and then uses a computer to check for names, numbers and words that have been identified as suspicious.
"The whole idea of the NSA is intercepting huge streams of communications, taking in 2 million pieces of communications an hour," said James Bamford, the author of two books on the NSA, who was the first to reveal the inner workings of the secret agency.
"They have a capacity to listen to every overseas phone call," said Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, which has obtained documents about the NSA's using Freedom of Information Act requests.
There is nothing new about this capability:
The NSA's system of monitoring e-mails and phone calls to check for search terms has been used for decades overseas, where the Constitution's prohibition on unreasonable searches does not apply, declassified records have shown.
But since Bush's order in 2001, Bamford and other specialists said, the same process probably has been used to sort through international messages to and from the United States, though humans have never seen the vast majority of the data.
The distinction between computers screening calls and humans eavesdropping is likely to become a contentious one. But really it is just semantics. They collect the info, screen it using whatever search words they want (dkos, Feingold, etc). There is no inherent protection offered by this intermediate step, but the legal precedents are not there yet.
The closest comparisons, legal specialists said, are cases challenging the use of dogs and infrared detectors to look for drugs without a warrant. The Supreme Court approved the use of drug-sniffing dogs to examine luggage in an airport, but said police could not use infrared scanners to check houses for heat patterns that could signal an illegal drug=:" operation.
"This is very much a developing field, and a lot of the law is not clear," said Harvard Law School professor Bill Stuntz.
I refer one and all to
Armando's diary on the FP for further comments on the legal issues.
What about the outsourced Helpdesk calls routed to Bangalore? I hope the Creep Veep Cheney has fun listening to those.....
But seriously, this is a whole new breed of cat, though still a cat. I imagine Abu and Harriet and the rest of the mental giants working for Busheney can obfuscate this enough to keep half the country guessing about what is really happening to our civil rights.