MORE ON ILLEGAL NSA SPYING

David Swanson of After Downing Street breaks a BIG story about Cheney's illegal spying:

New NSA Whistleblower Speaks
Submitted by dswanson on Sun, 2007-07-01 05:48.

Kinne says that post-9-11 she and others routinely collected information on people even after identifying them as aid workers for non-governmental organizations. A common rationale was that the phones of such organizations could conceivably be seized by terrorists.

Shortly after this incident, however, in mid-2002, they were given a waiver to spy on Americans. This waiver was communicated to Kinne and her colleagues orally, and she assumed that it had come from the President or someone very high up. The waiver, she says, also permitted spying on Canadian, French, German, Australian, and British citizens without probable cause.

We need to know WHO gave the authorization and WHY they decided to do so.