Just recently, you denied that the NSA puts out an electronic net that intercepts thousands of phone calls looking for key words.
But I want to put up what The Washington Post said in the article today. Take a look if you will, sir. “Computer-controlled systems collect and sift basic information about hundreds of thousands of faxes, e-mails and telephone calls into and out of the United States before selecting the ones for scrutiny by human eyes and ears.”
Without getting into the numbers, is there a broad, wide-scale electronic net that you put out that means that you intercept lots of phone calls or communications involving Americans, or is there not?
Let me try to make this very, very clear. About the last third of the Post article is an excursion along the lines that you just described, that we somehow grab the content of communications and then use the content of the communications to determine which of the communications we really want to listen to. That is not true.
He sounds direct and sincere to me (not sarcasm, really).
My goal today is to provide you and the American people with as
much insight as possible into three questions: (a) What did NSA
know prior to September 11th, (b) what have we learned in
retrospect, and (c) what have we done in response?