A colleague alerts me that illegal wiretapping began before 911, and I located a well-written article on this very subject at Truthout. Truthout is a great resource for well-documented articles on matter which doesn’t get looked at in depth in the major news media outlets.
The NSA’s vast data-mining activities began shortly after Bush was sworn in as president and the document contradicts his assertion that the 9/11 attacks prompted him to take the unprecedented step of signing a secret executive order authorizing the NSA to monitor a select number of American citizens thought to have ties to terrorist groups.