MAINWAY

[7] According to Pulitzer Prize winning journalist James Risen, MAINWAY was the most important of the four components that comprised the ThinThread program.

It is often viewed as an illegal warrantless search and violation of the pen register provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and (in some cases) the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution.

This contrasts with a related NSA controversy concerning warrantless surveillance of selected telephone calls; in that case they did confirm the existence of the program of debated legality.

[9] Similar programs exist or are planned in other countries, including Sweden (Titan traffic database)[10] and Great Britain (Interception Modernisation Programme).

[15][16] Such efforts have been the focus of the NSA's recent attempts to acquire key technologies from high tech firms in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

[citation needed][19] ThinThread, a system designed largely by William Binney, which pre-dated this database, but was discarded for the Trailblazer Project, introduced some of the technology which is used to analyze the data.

On May 22, 2006, it was revealed by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh and Wired magazine that the program involved the NSA setting up splitters to the routing cores of many telecoms companies and to major Internet traffic hubs.

"Based on our review to date, we have confirmed no such contract exists and we have not provided bulk customer calling records to the NSA," the officials said.

[40] President Bush issued a presidential memorandum on May 5, 2006 delegating authority to make such a designation to Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, just as the NSA call database scandal appeared in the media.

[41] The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a related suit against AT&T on January 31, 2006, alleging that the firm had given NSA access to its database, a charge reiterated in the USA Today article.

[42] Verizon and BellSouth have both claimed they were never contacted by the NSA, nor did they provide any information to the agency,[38][43] though US codes of law[44] permit companies to lie about their activities when the President believes that telling the truth would compromise national security.

[40] On June 6, 2013, in the wake of well-publicized leaks of top secret documents by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, conservative public interest lawyer and Judicial Watch founder Larry Klayman filed a lawsuit (Klayman v. Obama) challenging the constitutionality and statutory authorization of the government's wholesale collection of phone record metadata.

Once the judge in each case had issued rulings seemingly at odds with one another, Gary Schmitt (former staff director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence) wrote in The Weekly Standard, "The two decisions have generated public confusion over the constitutionality of the NSA's data collection program—a kind of judicial 'he-said, she-said' standoff.

In 2015, the appeals court ruled that Section 215 of the Patriot Act did not authorize the bulk collection of metadata, which judge Gerard E. Lynch called a "staggering" amount of information.

"[50] Spurred by the public disclosure of the NSA call database, a lawsuit was filed against Verizon on May 12, 2006 at the Federal District Court in Manhattan by Princeton, N.J. based attorneys Carl Mayer and Bruce Afran.

[53] Shortly after the NSA call database story surfaced, a San Francisco lawsuit, Hepting v. AT&T, was filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

[54][55] On May 14, 2006, the Los Angeles Times reported that the U.S. Justice Department called for an end to an eavesdropping lawsuit against AT&T Corp., citing possible damage from the litigation to national security.

[54][56] In an April 28 Statement of Interest of the AT&T case, the US government indicated that it intends to invoke the State Secrets Privilege in a bid to dismiss the action.

[58] Separate from the question of whether the database is illegal under FISA, one may ask whether the call detail records are covered by the privacy protection of the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

[68] The Church Committee Senate final report, which investigated COINTELPRO declared that: Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been collected.

He promised to "carefully monitor" the program for abuse, but said that, "Given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay.

"[72] In the option, Judge Eagan said "data collection is authorized under Section 215 of the Patriot Act that allows the FBI to issue orders to produce tangible things if there are reasonable grounds to believe the records are relevant to a terrorism investigation.