Pitiful

This is a continuation of what Champollion wrote about below.

The Washington Post is several weeks late to this story, but confirms what the NY Times found earlier regarding the overarching nature of the NSA domestic spying program:

Intelligence officers who eavesdropped on thousands of Americans in overseas calls under authority from President Bush have dismissed nearly all of them as potential suspects after hearing nothing pertinent to a terrorist threat, according to accounts from current and former government officials and private-sector sources with knowledge of the technologies in use.

Bush has recently described the warrantless operation as "terrorist surveillance" and summed it up by declaring that "if you're talking to a member of al Qaeda, we want to know why." But officials conversant with the program said a far more common question for eavesdroppers is whether, not why, a terrorist plotter is on either end of the call. The answer, they said, is usually no.

Fewer than 10 U.S. citizens or residents a year, according to an authoritative account, have aroused enough suspicion during warrantless eavesdropping to justify interception of their domestic calls, as well. That step still requires a warrant from a federal judge, for which the government must supply evidence of probable cause.

That last paragraph both demonstrates how grave a violation of civil liberties this is -- it also, perhaps inadvertently, implies a legal distinction between these calls. The standard of eavesdropping on a conversation does NOT diminish whether the call involves someone overseas as long as one part of the conversation occurs in the United States. It is "probable cause" for listening either way, and a warrant is required.

And how does it work?

By consciously sorting and listening in:

Surveillance takes place in several stages, officials said, the earliest by machine. Computer-controlled systems collect and sift basic information about hundreds of thousands of faxes, e-mails and telephone calls into and out of the United States before selecting the ones for scrutiny by human eyes and ears.

Successive stages of filtering grow more intrusive as artificial intelligence systems rank voice and data traffic in order of likeliest interest to human analysts. But intelligence officers, who test the computer judgments by listening initially to brief fragments of conversation, "wash out" most of the leads within days or weeks.

The scale of warrantless surveillance, and the high proportion of bystanders swept in, sheds new light on Bush's circumvention of the courts. National security lawyers, in and out of government, said the washout rate raised fresh doubts about the program's lawfulness under the Fourth Amendment, because a search cannot be judged "reasonable" if it is based on evidence that experience shows to be unreliable. Other officials said the disclosures might shift the terms of public debate, altering perceptions about the balance between privacy lost and security gained.

That, ladies and gentlemen, without any reasonable argument whatsoever, is a combination of data mining and wilfull and deliberate monitoring of specific phone calls, not even "reasonable" let alone constituting probable cause.

The fact that Bush has deliberately done this and states he will do it again and again and again, despite its clear illegal nature has only one remedy.

IMPEACH.

Oh yeah, Champollion is right about General Hayden too.