[2] The committee report found the "Americans who violated no criminal law and represented no genuine threat to the 'national security' have been targeted, regardless of the stated predicate.
The inherently intrusive nature of electronic surveillance, moreover, has enabled the Government to generate vast amounts of information – unrelated to any legitimate governmental interest – about the personal and political lives of American citizens.
[7] On December 16, 2005, the New York Times printed a story asserting that following 9/11, "President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying", as part of the War on Terrorism:[8] Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said.
The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.The revelation of this program caused a widespread controversy, with legal experts and politicians[who?]
[12] The database's existence prompted fierce objection from those who viewed it as a warrantless or illegal search – nevertheless, the collection of such third-party information has been authorized by the USA PATRIOT Act, and has been upheld by the courts.
Even without taking into account the President's inherent constitutional authority to conduct warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance, we think the procedures and government showings required under FISA, if they do not meet the minimum Fourth Amendment warrant standards, certainly come close.
We, therefore, believe firmly, applying the balancing test drawn from Keith, that FISA as amended is constitutional because the surveillances it authorizes are reasonable.
[14]The "balancing test drawn from Keith" is a reference to United States v. U.S. District Court, in which the Supreme Court of the United States established a legal test to determine whether the primary use of the warrantless search was to collect foreign intelligence, as per presidential authority, or whether that primary use is to gather evidence for use in a criminal trial.