Mark, you are probably right -- they couldn't meet the criterion to obtain a FISA warrant, but there's a bigger reason. The NSA is casting a *very* wide net. One so wide that it would become administratively impossible to seek authorization for each instance of interception.

If you put together the publicly-available information, it's pretty easy to conclude that the NSA is using a some derivative of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) initiative that John Poindexter put together back in the late nineties. This implies that the NSA is quite possibly dealing with thousands, if not tens-of-thousands of concurrent phone calls, fax transmission, email intercepts, etc. They're using voice recognition and pattern matching to mine what is probably petabytes worth of data in near real-time. The model of surveillance they're using doesn't lend itself to warrants.

Take a look at Ars Technica's excellent article on the subject for speculation about the technology being used by the NSA.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051220-5808.html

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