Of course, Bush lied to us about the scale of His warrantless surveillance program, and it took all of a day for that lie to unravel. Now, the experts, the insiders, the well connected are all wondering: How bad is it, really? The consensus is: Pretty bad. And domestic surveillance--not this "foreign" figleaf--is almost certainly involved. Merry Christmas, America! The LA Times:

President Bush has acknowledged that several hundred targeted Americans were wiretapped without warrants under the National Security Agency's domestic spying program, and now some U.S. officials and outside experts say they suspect that the government is engaged in a far broader U.S. surveillance operation.

It's a long story, so bear with me as I quote:

The suspicion is quietly gaining currency among current and former U.S. intelligence officials and among outside experts familiar with how the NSA operates.

The NSA conducts such "wholesale" surveillance continuously almost everywhere else in the world.

Powerful NSA supercomputers search this "sigint" — short for signals intelligence — for words that might suggest terrorist plots, such as "bomb," then pass the information to intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Gen. Michael V. Hayden, former head of the NSA and now the No. 2 U.S. intelligence official, has said the NSA does not use the same technologies to purposely spy on Americans. The agency is prohibited from doing so by federal laws enacted after the domestic spying scandals of the 1970s.

Rare exceptions must be approved by a special court overseeing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.

This month it was disclosed that the Bush administration has circumvented the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor hundreds of Americans since the Sept. 11 attacks without any warrants.

So the question now becomes: Where else have they circumvented FISA and the courts? What Bush says:

Bush and his inner circle said the practice is limited to occasions when an individual in the U.S. is communicating with someone overseas who has a known link to Al Qaeda, other terrorist groups or their supporters.

But what Bush does--who knew--may be different from what he says:

But some officials and other experts believe the top-secret program may be doing more than that.

"It's really obvious to me that it's a look-at-everything type program," said cryptography expert Bruce Schneier, who has written several books about security. [As well as the Solitaire encryption system that appears in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon.]

One former senior Pentagon official who has overseen such "data mining" said he also believed the NSA was probably conducting such wholesale surveillance.

"It's a reasonable hypothesis," the official said, adding that he believed it was necessary against savvy terrorists who would otherwise remain undetected.

One former NSA signals-intelligence analyst, Russell D. Tice, said the agency has long had such ability.

"I'm not allowed to say one way or another what the NSA is or is not doing. But the technology exists," said Tice, who left the NSA this year.

"Say Aunt Molly in Oklahoma calls her niece at an Army base in Germany and says, 'Isn't it horrible about those terrorists and Sept. 11?' " Tice said: That conversation would not only be captured by NSA satellites listening in on Germany — which is legal — but flagged and listened to by NSA analysts and possibly transcribed for further investigation.

"All you would have to do is move the vacuum cleaner a little to the left [Hmm....] and begin sucking up the other end of that conversation," Tice said. "You move it a little more and you could be picking up everything people are saying from California to New York."

In interviews, current and former intelligence officials said communications technology was so advanced that it would probably be next to impossible for the NSA to filter out all of the U.S.-based electronic communications even if it wanted to when casting a wide net for terrorists

Some administration critics in Congress have begun speculating that the administration is specifically directing the NSA to conduct such surveillance on people in the U.S.

"Based on how much their story keeps changing, I think there's more to the story", said Susan McCue, chief of staff to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). "A lot of people on Capitol Hill think that."

If the Republicans would just tell the truth, He wouldn't have to worry about keeping all their stories straight. But n-o-o-o-o...

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was not designed to accommodate data-mining projects, and some experts and knowledgeable former U.S. officials suspect that that is why the administration is circumventing it.

That's Bush. "Circumvent" (i.e., break) the law instead of asking for the law to be changed, or going to a court.

Because data mining entails tracing potentially millions of innocent links to find a few suspicious ones, authorities would immediately encounter problems establishing probable cause to proceed. Then, the experts say, authorities would have to obtain warrants under the surveillance act for vast numbers of phone numbers and e-mail addresses.

But they haven't done that (unless in secret, of course). So I guess we're still waiting for the other jackboot to drop on this one.

Can't somebody give Bush a blowjob so we can impeach him?

NOTE See part I of "Digital Treason," The Network Architecture of Treason for the communications technology aspect of this story. The next part is coming up shortly.