WASHINGTON — President Bush has acknowledged that several hundred targeted Americans were wiretapped without warrants under the National Security Agency's domestic spying program, and now some U.S. officials and outside experts say they suspect that the government is engaged in a far broader U.S. surveillance operation.
Although these experts have no specific evidence, they say that the NSA has a vast array of satellites and other high-tech tools that it could be using to eavesdrop on a much larger cross-section of people in the United States without permission from a court.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday December 28, 2005 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 40 words Type of Material: Correction
Domestic spying -- An article in Sunday's Section A about the National Security Agency's domestic spying activities said an FBI "data mining" program called Carnivore was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It was created in June 2000.
The suspicion is quietly gaining currency among current and former U.S. intelligence officials and among outside experts familiar with how the NSA operates.
The NSA conducts such "wholesale" surveillance continuously almost everywhere else in the world. It does so by using a sprawling network of land-based satellite transponder stations and friendly foreign intelligence agencies and telecommunication companies to collect millions of phone calls, e-mails and other communications.
Powerful NSA supercomputers search this "sigint" -- short for signals intelligence -- for words that might suggest terrorist plots, such as "bomb," then pass the information to intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
Gen. Michael V. Hayden, former head of the NSA and now the No. 2 U.S. intelligence official, has said the NSA does not use the same technologies to purposely spy on Americans. The agency is prohibited from doing so by federal laws enacted after the domestic spying scandals of the 1970s.
Rare exceptions must be approved by a special court overseeing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. The top-secret tribunal considers requests for warrants when the NSA or FBI believes such surveillance is needed to protect national security.
This month it was disclosed that the Bush administration has circumvented the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor hundreds of Americans since the Sept. 11 attacks without any warrants. Bush and his inner circle said the practice is limited to occasions when an individual in the U.S. is communicating with someone overseas who has a known link to Al Qaeda, other terrorist groups or their supporters.
But some officials and other experts believe the top-secret program may be doing more than that.
"It's really obvious to me that it's a look-at-everything type program," said cryptography expert Bruce Schneier, who has written several books about security.
