et al - Sounds like they have went before a judge and have a warrant.

"If you are an American and you are talking to Al Queda, well we would sure like to know about it"

NSA whistleblower Russ Tice says he will tell Congress Wednesday of "probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts" involving the agency's former director, Gen. Michael Hayden, President Bush's nominee to run the CIA. Tice, a former technical intelligence specialist at NSA who first went public on ABC News, says he has been asked to testify Wednesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee. In a letter to the committee, Tice says the alleged illegal acts involved "very highly sensitive intelligence programs and operations known as Special Access Programs (SAPs)."

In case all the secrecy isn't enough to make them five kinds of crazy, eavesdroppers also spend their days riffling through other people's private communications. Whether your target is a soccer mom or Osama Bin Laden, you spend whole workweeks listening in--not just to the logistical preparations of terrorist plots but to gossip and grocery lists as well. When civilians gain unusual insight into the scope of America's eavesdropping apparatus, as they have through the Times revelations, it often seems like science fiction. But for eavesdroppers, it's what allows you to do your job. This is why when Russ Tice suggests that the number of Americans subject to Bush's eavesdropping program could be "in the millions," we should not immediately write him off as alarmist. Sources in addition to Tice sketched out the wiretapping program for the Times. But since the revelations became public, no one else has come forward. In an echo chamber of unnamed "senior officials," Tice has the virtue of being a flesh-and-blood witness with a name and a professional history. He can testify about his experiences working in the most secret divisions of the most secret intelligence agency in the country. He will be vigorously criticized by the administration and the NSA. And the details of his professional history, to say nothing of the Orwellian stories he may relate, will make it all too easy to dismiss his claims. But as the old joke goes, "You'd be paranoid too, if they were trying to kill you." Perhaps if we knew what he knows, we'd be a little more paranoid ourselves.

What's that smell in this room? Didn't you notice it, Brick? Didn't you notice the powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity? Yes, sir, I think I did. Ain't nothing more powerful than the odor of mendacity.