After 9/11, NSA initially went it alone

(more from the nyt...)

obviously, the agency wouldn't have expanded its scope of domestic surveillance without a sense that they were acting within their charter of defined authority... what this tells me is that they have been engaged in this kind of activity for a lot longer than they are saying...

The National Security Agency acted on its own authority, without a formal directive from President Bush, to expand its domestic surveillance operations in the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to declassified documents released Tuesday.

The N.S.A. operation prompted questions from a leading Democrat, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, who said in an Oct. 11, 2001, letter to a top intelligence official that she was concerned about the agency's legal authority to expand its domestic operations, the documents showed.

Ms. Pelosi's letter, which was declassified at her request, showed much earlier concerns among lawmakers about the agency's domestic surveillance operations than had been previously known. Similar objections were expressed by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, in a secret letter to Vice President Dick Cheney nearly two years later.

i firmly believe that, as things continue to come out, we will see that domestic spying has been widespread for quite some time, and i'm talking in decades, not years...

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