If the United States was looking for the communications of a terrorism suspect, he said, "it needs to be such that when you make a query you come away confident that you have the whole answer".
That legal interpretation is significant, several outside legal experts said, because it uses a relatively narrow area of the law — used to justify airport screenings, for instance, or drunken-driving checkpoints — and applies it much more broadly, in secret, to the wholesale collection of communications in pursuit of terrorism suspects.
WASHINGTON — Congress gave final approval on Friday to a bill extending the government's power to intercept electronic communications of spy and terrorism suspects, after the Senate voted down proposals from several Democrats and Republicans to increase protections of civil liberties and privacy.
We have the authority to monitor the conversations of 16 of 158,000 federal inmates and their attorneys because we suspect these communications could facilitate acts of terrorism.
AT&T and several other major carriers are being sued over their reported role in the program, which permitted eavesdropping without warrants on the international communications of Americans suspected of terrorism ties.
President Bush had secretly authorized the wiretapping program in October 2001, three weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, to allow the N.S.A. to eavesdrop on the international communications of Americans suspected of terrorism ties without getting a court order normally required in such circumstances.
It would be glib for the government to require judges to approve warrants to intercept communications, the former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation has said, as he called for an end to the "demonisation" of the security services.
It said the standoff had prevented C.I.A. officials from gaining access to transcripts of intercepted communications between terrorism suspects, and criticized Mr. Tenet as not interceding to resolve these turf battles.
The aim of terrorism is to terrorize.
