Overflight, 91

“The NSA has a $52 billion budget and the ability to monitor tens of millions of calls a second. You think they're not using it?”
book/film The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine/The Big Short, from en.wikiquote.org

“«Thank you for inviting me here and for giving me the opportunity to express my story. But let me give you some of my background. I spent about four years in the military, and then I went to the NSA, directly, so I ended up with about 37 years of service. … Fundamentally I started working with data, looking at data and data systems, and how you do that. I was developing this concept, and that was that you could lay it out in such a way that they could be coded and executed electronically, meaning you could automate analisys. … It must have been right after a few days, no more than a week after the 9/11 that they had decided to begin actively spying on everyone in this country. And they wanted that part of our program to run all the spying. So, that’s exactly what they did. And then they started taking telecom data, and they expanded there after that. I mean, the one I knew was AT&T, and that one provided 320 million records every day. That program was re−authorized every 45 days by what I call the "Yes Committee", which was Hayden and Tenet and the DOJ (Department Of Justice). That program was called STELLARWIND. So, first I went to the House Intellgence Committe, and the staff member that I personally knew there, and she then went to the Chairman of that Committee, Nancy Pelosi, who was the Minority Rep[resentative]. They were all briefed into that program at the time, by the way, and all the other programs that were going on, including all these CIA programs. I wasn’t alone in this, there were four others of the NSA; we were all trying to work internally in the government for all of these years, trying to get them to come around to being constitutionally acceptable, and take it into the Courts, and have the Courts’ oversight over that, too.