The key quote this morning from Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), the ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, on The Guardian’s big story:
This is nothing particularly new. This has been going on for seven years under the auspices of the FISA authority, and every member of the United States Senate has been advised of this.
That essentially confirms that the order obtained by The Guardian was not a one-off, isolated order. Rather, it was one of many such orders, approved by a series of FISA court judges, directed to multiple telecom carriers over many years. Seven years, as Chambliss says.
An anonymous TPM Reader gives us a look from the inside …
In your post, you ask “why wouldn’t [they] go back during the plot itself?” in regards to phone records.
I guarantee they did just that. I’ve worked for AT&T for close to 15 years now, spending most of my time in the network engineering side of the house. Call records on our network can be pulled for many, many months in the past. Getting these call records is probably one of the first things they did in the investigation so they probably weren’t part of this later
NSA request.
