Is ABC News Confused Over Scope of NSA Program?:
ABC News has — or at least tries to have -- a big gotcha on the Bush Adminsitration about NSA surveillance:
  Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia.
  Intercept operators allege the NSA is listening to citizens' phone calls.
  The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), called the allegations "extremely disturbing" and said the committee has begun its own examination. . . .
  "These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones," said Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to a special military program at the NSA's Back Hall at Fort Gordon from November 2001 to 2003.
  In testimony before Congress, then-NSA director Gen. Michael Hayden, now director of the CIA, said private conversations of Americans are not intercepted. . . .
  Asked for comment about the ABC News report and accounts of intimate and private phone calls of military officers being passed around, a US intelligence official said "all employees of the US government" should expect that their telephone conversations could be monitored as part of an effort to safeguard security and "information assurance."
  This is a noteworthy story. This particular monitoring hasn't been public before: As a commenter points out, it is probably the ECHELON program at work, or at least something close to it. And besides, how often do NSA analysts talk about their work?!? But it seems pretty clearly incorrect to say that this story suggests that Bush and the intelligence heads were lying about the Terrorist Surveillance Program the New York Times first reported on in 2005. The problem is that this appears to be a different monitoring program than the TSP.

  Recall that the TSP was controversial largely because the government appeared to be violating FISA: It violated FISA because the NSA was collecting information inside the U.S. through U.S. switches. But this program appears to be based on satellite monitoring of satellite calls from the Middle East, which FISA did not attempt to regulate until the latest FISA Amendments Act of 2008. So while it's still an important story, the link to the TSP strikes me as really weak.