Spying on innocent people (Reprint from last night)

I think this BIG NYTimes story tonight affirms that the US gov't was illegally spying on innocent people. No Al Qaeda connections, no more defense. I haven't said it before, but if this evidence is true, it may be time to really significantly discuss impeachment.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 - In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. The spy agency was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of foreign-related phone and Internet traffic.

Normally, I aim for a nuanced analysis, but this is black and white. This is spying on innocent citizens without a warrant and without enough justification to get a warrant. This is a crime.

UPDATE: The ACLU and the CRR are suing over the NSA spying. The defendants are mainly lawyers who have defended terror clients. Even without evidence they were specifically spied on, I think they have pretty good standing because of the likelihood from the public descriptions of the program.

In his WaPo Medianotes blog/column, Howard Kurtz puts it succinctly:

Translation: They spied like crazy, ignored the rules and still came up empty.