The most important question on NSA spying.

I posed this question two weeks ago as a curiousity, but I still think it may be the most revealing as to the nature and intent of the program if we ever get an answer.

Who was the requestor for the NSA eavesdropping?

In other words, what person or agency submitted a prospective target to the NSA and under what circumstances and methods did they come to determine that that individual should be tapped? And then, how did that information get back to them? For instance, was the NSA used as a cutout for the Department of Defense who is legally precluded from this sort of information collection?

There have been previous oblique mentions that some of the information obtained through the warrantless wiretapping was shared fairly widely among the different government agencies, reports of direct leads given to the FBI, and, more troublingly to me, some mentions that some of this illegally obtained information was given to the Defense dept. (Note: the NSA is under DoD in the governmental structural tree.)

I mention all this because Congressional Quarterly has a story on what I think is a rather significant memo written by the Army's top Intel officer in 2001 (post 9-11) which claims

"Not only that, military intelligence agencies are permitted to “receive” domestic intelligence information, even though they cannot legally “collect” it.” ....

“Remember, merely receiving information does not constitute ‘collection’ under AR [Army Regulation] 381-10; collection entails receiving ‘for use,’ ” he added.

Maybe something, maybe nothing. But, in the wake of the Talon database collecting info on antiwar protestors, it seems to further indicate that the US military may be involved in other questionable intelligence "receiving" activities.

I may not have described this adequately, so, if you're interested, read the CQ article and the short memo (2 page - .pdf) and see what you read there. To me, I'm seeing a bit of a justification for pushing the legal limits which bind military intel collection in the US. But, I can't say whether this specifically indicates an answer to the question above.