The NSA had secretly attached intercepts to the undersea fibre optic cables that ringed the world.
In the past, the American and Indian intelligence services have used communications intercepts to tie Kashmiri militants to terrorist strikes.
The trial heard that in an operation called Shadower, MI5 described transcripts of telephone intercepts to other intelligence agencies as a "secret and reliable source".
The Hammarskjöld commission, chaired by a former British court of appeal judge, Sir Stephen Sedley, called for the NSA intercepts to be released.
But Georgia's interior minister, Vano Merabishvili, produces radio intercepts to show Russian forces entering the Roki tunnel and pouring into South Ossetia long before.
Now, United States District Judge Jed S. Rakoff has ordered the defendants to release the wiretap intercepts to the S.E.C. by Feb 15.
Senate Democrats took advantage of Mr. Bolton's transgression in the nomination battle, playing up his reputation as a sharp-elbowed bureaucratic brute and implying that he might have used the intercepts to intimidate Washington adversaries.
When talking about the summer war, he darts from the history of Soviet policy toward minorities to anecdotes about generals and presidents, and from bits about phone intercepts to citations from the Washington Post.
The new emphasis on human intelligence is essential, for it is much better than electronic intercepts to answer the crucial questions for American foreign policy: Will China become a military threat?
The Georgians are handing out evidence, including telephone intercepts, to show that large numbers of Russian troops entered South Ossetia through the Roki tunnel on August 7th, long before the Georgians began bombarding the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali.
"As I said before my understanding is that the only person here who could sign off and authorise the use of telephone intercepts to catch men in the act so to speak would be Theresa Villiers, the current secretary of state, or any future one," he said.
