The White House wanted to go fishing, and our domestic telecoms provided the pond. When Bush described this as a limited program that target international calls of suspected terrorists, that apparently isn't … what's the word … true. BUSH LIED ABOUT THIS TOO.
As the NYT explains, the NSA eavesdropped without warrants on specific conversations, but also utilized telecom "switches" to "comb through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation."
As Kevin noted, this is all a very impressive use of technology, which also appears to be illegal.
It's why Bush couldn't get and didn't want warrants for his program. FISA courts would have approved any call the administration wanted to tap, even retroactively, and Congress would have approved changes to FISA to strengthen the president's surveillance hand. But the White House had data mining, not specific conversations, on its mind.
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