Here’s an update on the NSA program, see Senator Kit Bond deflate Leaky Leahy here.
The case of Smith v. Maryland in 1979, the U.S. Supreme Court said that the government could continue to use phone records, who called from where to where, at what time, for what length, for intelligence and criminal investigations without a warrant.
This has been going on, and this has been gone on long before the president’s program started. And the president’s program, as he designed, as he explained it, has been designed, and is carefully monitored by the lawyers from the NSA and the Department of Justice to make sure that they target telephone communications from or to overseas al-Qaida or al-Qaida known affiliates.
And this program has given us significant leads and allowed us to identify terrorists and to break up planned plots in the United States. Telephone calls from domestic to domestic-foreign phone calls are not targeted, are not used — their content is not used — unless there is a court order.
See President Bush response here.