The NSA stuff, as you all well know, makes no sense. The Court is so malleable that even if Bush were issuing improper taps, they'd likely as not be approving them anyway. It's fine to impute bad motives to the president (and I've been doing a fair bit of it), but, according to the quotes Kevin collects, that's not necessarily the likeliest explanation.
What we may be seeing is a massive data mining operation, something of huge scale and uncertain legality. According to Bruce Schneier, this is a massive expansion and focusing of Echelon, the storied NSA electronic data program. Since the idea here would be blanket data collection, individual warrants would make no sense. Now, it's not clear to me how Echelon, which was already sorting and analyzing data, could be retargeted and narrowed to become a nimble espionage tool, but I admittedly don't know that much about it. Time, I guess, to start finding out.
