Keep in mind that NSA has always gathered data on US citizens in the course of performing foreign intelligence but was heretofore supposed to filter rather than use it. What is different in the present case is that a decision was made to use the data, both newly gathered and likely that which was stored unfilered for future mining. What could come out of a DoJ probe is exactly who implemented that decision and whether they were given exculpation, and if so, how was that done and by whom. Did senior NSA officials get exculpation and if so what precisely was it and did it differ from what those lower down were given. Further, members of the military performing NSA duites are given different exculpation than the civilians due to differing employment and service regulations. A large percentage of interception operatives are civilians, some former service members but far from all. US civilian intelligence members -- State, FBI, DEA, and several other departments with intelligence duties -- are also involved in processing intercepted data and preparing it for distribution to NSA customers. And there are foreign military members working at NSA as well as civilians -- and those are not only from UK, CA, AU and NZ but from NATO and other treaty country participants. These foreign operatives are given instructions both by their own superiors and also by those from the US on how to handle intercepts of citizens from the countries who provide NSA operatives as well as data gathered on US citizens. There have been incidents reported of these foreign operatives performing or processing intercepts forbidden to the US while sitting adjacent to the US operatives, with consequent disclosure. This goes beyond the well-known US-UK backscratching. Beyond orders to gather information on US citizens there is the question of what was done to mine long-stored raw data which has presumably been filtered. Recall NSA policy to never discard any encrypted material gathered, none, forever. It is likely there is voluminous material on US citizens stored and ready for reassessment as needs be. There have been numerous revelations of other countries storing such data for decades, an example are the decades-long Stasi files obtained by the CIA from East Germany which the agency will still not release. All countries with intelligence capabilities have such files. And few are required to release them, such as the UK and US sometimes do for a small number. The US is surely not alone in amassing huge new files as a result of the terrorism intiative, for every time there is a war there is a surge in spying across the board, at home and overseas. 9/11 was a godsend to the spying industry which was slowly withering with the winddown of the artificially-prolonged Cold War. To be sure it has been immensely beneficial to the media industry, and a slew of other boats lifted by the desire for more information, the dirtier the better. Nice to see ACLU put its Echelon Watch files back up. A while back we went looking for Echelon Watch files at ACLU and found a bunch of them through Google still on the ACLU website, but nary a link on the main pages. Perhaps EPIC and others will also have a change of mind about Echelon after withdrawing material post-9/11. The there's Bamford's admission that after being invited to NSA for royal treatment and a classified briefing, he found the agency not so monstrous. What he was briefed on cannot be revealed, apparently, only that the place is honorably operated. When David Kahn was doing research at NSA, he claims he refused to be suckered and tainted by being given access to classified material. Big deceptions are often hidden by small ones delivered as exposes, and those given access to secrets are customarily obliged to tell only a sanitized version glossed with trust me the ex-trustworthy investigator.