Such communications included those of "officials of the executive branch (including the White House, cabinet departments, and independent agencies), the US House of Representatives and Senate (member and staff) and the US federal court system (including, but not limited to, the supreme court)".
But the Congressional vote that authorized eavesdropping without warrants on international communications, including those involving Americans within the United States, has shown that there is at least one arena in which Mr. Bush can still hold the line: terrorism.
Disclosures by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden showed the extent of the agency's focus on cracking and circumventing the encryption of digital communications, including those of Apple, Facebook, Google and Yahoo users.
Privacy and civil liberties groups criticized the administration's proposal because it would continue to permit the government to use a new surveillance system that the groups say may be used far more broadly than older technologies, enabling federal agents to monitor an unlimited amount of innocent communications, including those of people who are not targets of criminal investigations.
The US intelligence services remained tight-lipped about their reasons for allegedly monitoring Brazil's electronic communications, including those of Ms Rousseff herself.
Based in Zug, Switzerland, Berlin and elsewhere, Wire has a strong team with deep backgrounds in communications, including those who worked in product and technology at Apple, Skype, Nokia and Microsoft.
They also vacuumed up sensitive communications, including those of John Podesta, the Clinton campaign chairman.
Those communications included the phone calls between Michael Flynn, who was ousted as national security adviser last week, and the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak.
In its Citizens United decision, the Supreme Court, by an 8-1 majority, upheld the provisions of federal law that require outside spending groups to disclose their expenditures on electioneering communications, including the donors financing those expenditures.
