Here is a clue for the apparently clueless here:
In order to get a warrant you need to name the phone number/ location / person, and provide some idea of the thing you are searching for.
Now imagine we are living in the age of super computers, Imagine a computer at the NSA which can capture and monitor every phone call made out of the US and into the US, say 2 million calls at any given time. Imagine that this computer has a complex program that includes speach and voice recognition, and looks for certain patterns of calls to and from millions of locations, and looks for patterns of words.
When it finds something it writes it to a database and assigns a priority to it so it can pass through another set of programs on another super computer.
Eventually a human being will be allerted if over a certain time span there are repeats of the pattern being sought. This may take a day, a week, a month, 6 months.
How would one go about getting a warrant for the initial 2 million calls, when one doesnt know the location, or the number in advance.
72 hours later does one present all 2 million calls to the court for a warrant as described above?????? Imagine at the end of say a month this filtering database has come up with 1,000 locations that need to be checked, but most would have been monitored for the first time more than 72 hours ago.
Bush via his order allows the above to happen and the FBI to check out after the fact 20 of the 400,000,000 calls/ locations that were fed into the database and super computers that month.
That is what we are talking about.
Unfortunately Now that I have revealed this top secret, you will all have to be TERMINATED
JUST KIDDING