NSA Spying May Have Preceded 9/11

One of the Bush Administration's continual justifications for the warrantless, illegal and unconstitutional spying on American citizens is that 9/11 "changed everything," and that our civil liberties and laws restricting surveillance without court oversight were rendered quaint by September 11. According to Bloomberg.com:

The U.S. National Security Agency asked AT&T Inc. to help it set up a domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, lawyers claimed June 23 in court papers filed in New York federal court.

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The NSA initiative, code-named "Pioneer Groundbreaker," asked AT&T unit AT&T Solutions to build exclusively for NSA use a network operations center which duplicated AT&T's Bedminster, New Jersey facility, the court papers claimed. That plan was abandoned in favor of the NSA acquiring the monitoring technology itself, plaintiffs' lawyers Bruce Afran said.