Bush Administration Was Denied Spy Authority.

Former Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle has disclosed that while he was the Senate Majority Leader, he denied the Bush administration the legal authority to eavesdrop on American citizens. While the White House has claimed that it was granted the authority to violated the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution in a joint Congressional resolution authorizing military forced after 9/11, Daschle says the administration requested the authority, but was denied.

Former Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle said:

"Literally minutes before the Senate cast its vote, the administration sought to add the words 'in the United States and' after 'appropriate force' in the agreed-upon text. This last-minute change would have given the president broad authority to exercise expansive powers not just overseas -- where we all understood he wanted authority to act -- but right here in the United States, potentially against American citizens. I could see no justification for Congress to accede to this extraordinary request for additional authority. I refused."

Meanwhile, the Justice Department has admitted that the spy program does not comply with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

And The New York Times is reporting that the NSA has collected massive volumes of telecommunication data without court-approved warrants, far exceeding what the White House has already acknowledged.

According to the Times, the program approved by President Bush granted the NSA to extensive spying using US telecommunication arteries, with the cooperation of American telecommunication companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications.

Phil Karn, a computer engineer and technology expert at a major West Coast telecommunications company said that the NSA’s access to backdoor streams gives the spy agency “the capability of an enormous vacuum operation to sweep up data.”