US surveillance found to yield few suspects

WASHINGTON -- Intelligence officers who eavesdropped on thousands of Americans in overseas calls, under authority from President Bush, have dismissed almost all of them as potential suspects, after hearing nothing pertinent to a terrorist threat, according to officials and private-sector sources.

Bush has described the warrantless operation as ''terrorist surveillance" and has summed it up by declaring that ''if you're talking to a member of Al Qaeda, we want to know why."

But current and former officials familiar with the program said eavesdroppers first have to determine whether a terrorist plotter is on either end of the call. The answer, they said, is usually no.

Fewer than 10 US citizens or residents a year, according to an authoritative account, have aroused enough suspicion during warrantless eavesdropping to justify interception of their domestic calls, as well.

That step still requires a warrant from a federal judge, for which the government must supply evidence of probable cause.

The Senate Judiciary Committee will open hearings today into the eavesdropping program, and will take testimony from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

The committee's chairman, Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, said on NBC's ''Meet the Press" yesterday that Bush has yet to explain why the program does not violate a 1978 law specifically calling for a secret court to consider and approve such monitoring. He branded Gonzales's explanations to date as ''strained and unrealistic."

Specter said he believes there is no question that the monitoring program is a violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The only debate, he said, is whether the president has the constitutional power to circumvent the act.

The architect of the program, General Michael Hayden of the Air Force, and deputy director of intelligence, defended it yesterday, saying that intercepts target only those who, several analysts say, are ''Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda affiliates." Hayden, on ''Fox News Sunday," said that the program ''is very specific and very targeted" on collection of communications coming in or leaving the United States.

Hayden said that the intercepts are directed only at those who, several intelligence analysts say, are ''Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda affiliates."

The Bush administration refuses to say, in public or in closed session of Congress, how many Americans, in the past four years, have had their conversations recorded or their e-mail messages read by analysts without court authority. Two sources placed that number in the thousands; one of them said about 5,000.

The program has touched many more Americans than that. Surveillance takes place in several stages, officials said, the earliest by machine. Computer-controlled systems collect and sift basic information about hundreds of thousands of faxes, e-mail messages, and telephone calls into and out of the United States before selecting the ones for scrutiny.

Successive stages of filtering grow more intrusive as artificial intelligence systems rank voice and data traffic in order of likeliest interest to analysts. But intelligence officers, who test the computer judgments by listening to brief fragments of conversation, ''wash out" most of the leads within days or weeks.

The scale of warrantless surveillance, and the numbers of those who were swept in, sheds light on Bush's circumvention of the courts. National security lawyers, in and out of government, said the washout rate raised doubts about the program's lawfulness under the Fourth Amendment.

A search, they said cannot be judged ''reasonable" if it is based on evidence that experience shows to be unreliable.

Other officials said the disclosures might shift the terms of public debate, altering perceptions about the balance between privacy lost and security gained.

Hayden acknowledged in a news briefing last month that eavesdroppers ''have to go down some blind alleys to find the tips that pay off."

Other officials, almost all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not permitted to discuss the program, said the number of false leads is pronounced when US citizens or residents are watched. No intelligence agency, they said, believes that ''terrorist . . . operatives inside our country," as Bush described the surveillance targets, number anywhere near the thousands who have been subject to eavesdropping.

Vice President Dick Cheney said in December that eavesdropping without warrants ''has saved thousands of lives."

Hayden told senators last week that he ''cannot personally estimate" such a figure but that the program supplied information ''that would not otherwise have been available."

The FBI director, Robert S. Mueller 3d, said at the same hearing last week that the information helped identify ''individuals who were providing material support to terrorists."