The government obtained a temporary stay allowing it to continue intercepting e-mails and phone calls without individual warrants through May 31, McConnell said, as he began sounding alarms on Capitol Hill that a key piece of the nation's counter-terrorism capabilities was about to be crippled.
Those warnings fueled a frantic, end-of-summer push in Congress to rewrite laws passed three decades ago, after U.S. intelligence agencies had been caught spying on student groups and other domestic targets. The emergency legislation, which is set to expire in six months, allowed the government to resume its eavesdropping operations without individual warrants.
But the changes, and the hurried atmosphere in which they were adopted, have prompted many Democrats to express misgivings about the revisions. They have pledged to revisit the issue next month after Congress returns from its August recess.
In defending the wiretapping program, McConnell went further than any public official has in describing its scope and the extent to which it sweeps up communications of people within U.S. borders.
"There's a sense that we're doing massive data mining," he said, referring to the practice of searching for suspicious content by combing through calling data surrendered by telephone companies. "In fact, what we're doing is surgical. A telephone number is surgical. So, if you know what number, you can select it out."
McConnell's statement suggests that the government, which has access to most major telecommunications networks inside the United States, pulls out for review only the contents connected to phone numbers that are already under suspicion for ties to terrorism or other foreign intelligence priorities.
Critics of the program have questioned whether that is indeed the case and what safeguards are protecting U.S. residents from abuse of privacy rights.
McConnell said the nation's spy agencies obtained warrants any time they targeted someone inside U.S. borders. "It's a manageable thing," McConnell said. "On the U.S. persons side, it's 100 or less."
On the "foreign side," he said, "it's in the thousands."
Because so many of these calls travel through networks in the United States, McConnell said, the FISA court ruling created a significant new burden: Putting together a FISA warrant required "about 200 man-hours to do one telephone number."
