It was made clear to me that the original intent of government was to gain access to all the information it could without regard for constitutional safeguards. „You don‘t understand,“ I was told. „We just need the data.“

In the first week of October 2001, President Bush had signed an extraordinary order authorizing blanket dragnet electronic surveillance: Stellar Wind was a highly secret program that, without warrant or any approval from the Fisa court, gave the NSA access to all phone records from the major telephone companies, including US-to-US calls.