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Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval represents a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.

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Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation's legality and oversight.

According to those officials and others, reservations about aspects of the program have also been expressed by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and a judge presiding over a secret court that oversees intelligence matters. Some of the questions about the agency's new powers led the administration to temporarily suspend the operation last year and impose more restrictions, the officials said.

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The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted.

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While many details about the program remain secret, officials familiar with it said the N.S.A. eavesdropped without warrants on up to 500 people in the United States at any given time. The list changes as some names are added and others dropped, so the number monitored in this country may have reached into the thousands over the past three years, several officials said. Overseas, about 5,000 to 7,000 people suspected of terrorist ties are monitored at one time, according to those officials.

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...they said most people targeted for N.S.A. monitoring have never been charged with a crime, including an Iranian-American doctor in the South who came under suspicion because of what one official described as dubious ties to Osama bin Laden.

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(opening segment) Do you remember voting to let the Pentagon spy on us? There‘s a Department of Defense database listing 1,500 suspicious incidents in this country, including an antiwar protest planning session at the Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Florida.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is the J. Edgar Hoover vacuum cleaner.

They‘re collecting everything.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OLBERMANN: If the Pentagon‘s spending our money spying us on, that would at least explain why it‘s trying to save money by shipping the dead body of a 101st Airborne medic back home to San Diego as commercial freight. The father of the late Matthew John Holley joins us.

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OLBERMANN: If you saw Mr. Bush‘s impromptu question and answer session in Philadelphia yesterday, you will recall that he explained the Iraq war by saying that 9/11 changed his perception of foreign policy. He did not say domestic too, evidently he should have.

Case in point, a change giving the Pentagon authority to expand its intelligence collection inside the U.S., ostensibly to monitor the activities of would-be terrorists.

But as senior investigative correspondent Lisa Myers reports now in an NBC News exclusive, it turns out that the Pentagon is now using that authority to monitor those here who are merely protesting that war.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

LISA MYERS, MSNBC CHIEF INVESTIGATIVE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): A year ago, in Lake Worth, Florida, at this Quaker Meeting House.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Hi, everybody. welcome to...

MYERS: A small group of activists met to plan how to protest military recruiting at local high schools. What they didn‘t know was that their meeting had come to the attention of the U.S. military. This 400-page secret Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a threat, one of 1,500 suspicious incidents across the country over a 10-month period.

We showed the document to the group.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The incident type, threat.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Wow.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is incredible.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This peaceful, educationally oriented group being a threat is incredible.

MYERS (on camera): This document is the first inside look at how the Pentagon has stepped up intelligence collection in this country since 9/11, even monitoring peaceful protests against the Iraq war.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Americans should be concerned that the military in fact has reached too far.

MYERS: NBC News military analyst Bill Arkin says the Pentagon now collects domestic intelligence that goes beyond legitimate concerns about terrorism or protecting U.S. military installations.

For example, the database includes four dozen antiwar meetings, or protests, including this one in Hollywood. Some, but not all, the protests are aimed at military recruiting.

A briefing document, also stamped “Secret,” concludes, “We have noted increased communication between protest groups using the Internet, but not a significant connection between incidents, such as reoccurring instigators or vehicle descriptions.”

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It means there are actually collecting information about who‘s at those protests, the descriptions of vehicles at those protests.

MYERS: All this is disturbing but familiar to Christopher Pyle (ph), a former Army intelligence officer.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Some people never learn.

MYERS: During the Vietnam War, Pyle he blew the whistle on the Pentagon from monitoring and infiltrating antiwar and civil rights protests. The public was outraged, so the federal government put strict limits on military spying inside the U.S. Pyle says this database suggests the military may be doing it again.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is the J. Edgar Hoover Memorial Vacuum Cleaner. They‘re collecting everything.

MYERS: The Pentagon declined repeated requests for an interview. A spokesman said all domestic intelligence information is properly collected and involves protection of Defense Department installations, interests, and personnel.

But a professor at the U.S. Army War College sees dangerous territory.

LT. COL. BERT TUSSING (RET.), U.S. MARINE CORPS: If we start going down this slippery slope, it would be too easy to go back to a place we never want to see again.

MYERS: The Pentagon would not comment on how it obtained information on the Lake Worth meeting, or why it considers a dozen or so peace activists a threat.

Lisa Myers, NBC News, Washington.

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For those readers interested in a serious and thoughtful analysis of the legality of the President's authorization of NSA surveillance on American citizens, I recommend the following, which was written and signed by fourteen constitutional scholars and former government officials in response to a memorandum submitted to Congress by the Department of Justice:

Dear Members of Congress:

We are scholars of constitutional law and former government officials. We write in our individual capacities as citizens concerned by the Bush Administration's National Security Agency domestic spying program, as reported in the New York Times, and in particular to respond to the Justice Department's December 22, 2005 letter to the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees setting forth the administration's defense of the program. Although the program's secrecy prevents us from being privy to all of its details, the Justice Department's defense of what it concedes was secret and warrantless electronic surveillance of persons within the United States fails to identify any plausible legal authority for such surveillance. Accordingly the program appears on its face to violate existing law.

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