Some 48 percent now support the administration's program to monitor - without a court warrant - some U.S.-based calls with suspected links to terrorists. That's up from 42 percent last month. Half now say the administration should have to get a warrant, down from 56 percent one month ago.

Bush has been particularly successful at making his case for the National Security Agency's controversial monitoring among men and core segments of his base.

After weeks of insisting that divulging details would harm the program, the White House relented Wednesday and briefed House intelligence committee lawmakers. Thursday, the Senate learned more about the NSA program.

Press secretary Scott McClellan said the White House will listen to ideas that lawmakers have about legislation, but Bush has indicated that he would resist any move that would compromise the program.

"There is a high bar to overcome on such ideas," McClellan said.

The decision to give Congress more information came as Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., announced he was drafting legislation that would require the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to review the constitutionality of the administration's monitoring of terror-related international communications when one party to the call is in the United States.

It also came as Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., chairwoman of a House intelligence subcommittee that oversees the NSA, broke with the Bush administration and called for a full review of the NSA's program, along with legislative action to update the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

She and others also wanted the full House Intelligence Committee to be briefed on the program's operational details. Although the White House initially promised only information about the legal rationale for surveillance, administration officials broadened the scope Wednesday to include more sensitive details about how the program works.

Questions from Congress about the monitoring abound. Once publicly mum on the subject, House Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., sent a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales with 51 questions he wants answered by early March.

As part of his upcoming bill, Specter said he wants the FISA court to review the program to weigh the nature of the terrorist threat, the program's scope, the number of people being monitored and how the information is being handled.

Since the monitoring program's existence was first revealed in a newspaper report more than 50 days, senior administration officials have argued that Bush and Cheney were within the law when they chose to brief only the eight lawmakers who lead the House and Senate and their intelligence committees.

Several lawmakers want to hearings to review whether the FISA law should be updated.

Gonzales was the sole witness called to explain Bush's warrantless domestic spying, in obvious violation of the foreign intelligence surveillance act (Fisa) and circumvention of the special court created to administer it.

The scene at the Senate was acted as though scripted partly by Kafka, partly by Mel Brooks, and partly by John le Carré. After not being sworn in, the absence of oath-taking having been insisted upon by the Republicans, Gonzales offered legal reasoning even more imaginative than that he used to get Bush off jury duty: a melange of mendacity, absurdity and mystery.

The attorney general argued that Fisa did and did not apply; that the administration was operating within it, while flouting it; and that it didn't matter. The president's "inherent" power, after all, allowed him to do whatever he wanted. It was all, Gonzales said, "totally consistent". His explanation, observed Senator Arlen Specter, the Republican chairman of the judiciary committee, "defies logic and plain English".

Congress, Gonzales elaborated, had no proper constitutional role, but in any case had already approved the president's secret programme by voting for the authorisation of the use of military force in Afghanistan - even if members didn't know it; or even, when informed years later that they had approved the secret programme, objected that they hadn't known that that was what they were doing.

The legislation that was ignored, Gonzales declared, shouldn't be amended to bring this domestic spying under the law because the secret programme was already legal, or might be legal; and anyway it doesn't matter if Congress says it's legal. The all-powerful president should be trusted, but when Bush states wrongly that he goes to court for warrants, it's all right that he doesn't know what he is talking about. "As you know," said Gonzales, "the president is not a lawyer."

Who was or wasn't being spied on couldn't and wouldn't be explained. When Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, asked whether the programme could be used to "influence United States political processes, public opinion, policies or media", Gonzales replied: "Those are very, very difficult questions, and for me to answer those questions sort of off the cuff, I think would not be responsible." When Senator Joseph Biden, Democrat of Delaware, asked for assurances that only al-Qaida or suspected terrorists were subjected to surveillance, Gonzales answered: "Sir, I can't give you absolute assurance."

Nor would he say what the programme really was. "I am not comfortable going down the road of saying yes or no as to what the president has or has not authorised," Gonzales said. "I'm not going to respond to that. I'm not going to answer."

Gonzales's ultimate argument was an appeal to history. George Washington, he pointed out in a display of erudition, "intercepted British mail", footnoting a 1997 CIA report on the subject. In the civil war, the telegraph was wiretapped. And during both the first and second world wars, communications were intercepted. Gonzales's ahistoricism about technology aside (George Washington had no cell phones to tap, no computers to hack), Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt could not have broken a law that did not exist.

Through his convoluted testimony, the attorney general represented "the client" as a useful factotum again. But in his tour of history, he neglected the disclosure by the Associated Press on February 3 of about 200 pages of documents from the White House of President Gerald Ford. These papers highlighted the objections made by Ford's secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, and his chief of staff, Dick Cheney, to getting court warrants for domestic surveillance. It was partly to thwart such unaccountable executive power that Congress enacted Fisa in 1978.

Once again Cheney, the power behind the throne, has found a way to relieve the frustrations of the past. But he is fulfilling more than the curdled dreams of the Nixon and Ford era. The Bush presidency is straining to realise a pre-Washington ideal - unconstitutional monarchy.

· Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is the author of The Clinton Wars. Email: sidney_blumenthal@yahoo.com

In the mass roundup of more than 1,200 people shortly after 9/11, for example, it took very little for a Muslim or Arab illegal immigrant to be considered a "suspected terrorist," according to a 2003 report by the Justice Department's inspector general. Arab students were locked up as suspected terrorists for working at pizza parlors (in violation of their student visas); a Pakistani immigrant was jailed after attracting attention because he and his Queens housemates let their grass grow long and hung their underwear out to dry on the fence; and one Muslim was arrested because "he had taken a roll of film to be developed and the film had multiple pictures of the World Trade Center on it but no other Manhattan sites," the inspector general noted. Some FBI agents were even instructed to look in phone books to find Arab- or Muslim-sounding names, according to Newsweek columnist Steven Brill.

The Department of Homeland Security in May 2003 urged 18,000 local and state police departments to treat critics of the war on terror as potential terrorists, according to a confidential DHS memo made public in 2004. Suicide bombers, the feds told local lawmen, could be detected by such traits as a "pale face from recent shaving of beard"; they "may appear to be in a 'trance' "; their eyes may "appear to be focused and vigilant"; and their clothing may either be "out of sync with the weather" or just "loose."

The Transportation Security Administration is also extremely arbitrary in how it designates names for its "no-fly" list. There are an estimated 70,000 names in the registry — many of them stuck there for reasons that even the government cannot explain. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) were placed on the list. Everyone with the common name of "David Nelson" is treated like a would-be bomber — as are 4-year-old children unlucky enough to have a name matching one on the list.

Since December, according to media reports, TSA agents have been chatting up airline passengers to determine if they are terrorists, looking for such warning signs as "involuntary physical and psychological reactions" — including whether people appear stressed out, frightened or deceptive. The number of people who fear flying outnumber Al Qaeda associates by at least a few thousand-fold, yet visible anxiety will be enough for the TSA to justify taking people aside for far more intensive examination.

And the Pentagon has its own catchall definitions of suspicious and/or terrorist-related behavior. Its "counterintelligence field activity" program, ostensibly set up to protect domestic military bases and personnel, has been covertly gathering information on Americans who have done nothing more suspicious than protest against the Iraq war, including at last year's antiwar rally at Hollywood and Vine. Names gathered in such fishnets are being added to a Pentagon database involving the "terrorism threat warning process," according to Newsweek.

When Americans hear Bush say "terrorism surveillance program," they should recognize that the crosshairs may very well be on them. The more expansive and arbitrary the definition of "suspected terrorist," the more of our rights the feds can violate. Invoking the word "terrorism" must not raze all limits on the government's power to target citizens who pose no threat to public safety.

JAMES BOVARD is the author of "Attention Deficit Democracy" and eight other books.

"We don't realize that, as we live our lives and make little choices, like buying groceries, buying on Amazon, Googling, we're leaving traces everywhere," says Lee Tien, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "We have an attitude that no one will connect all those dots. But these programs are about connecting those dots - analyzing and aggregating them - in a way that we haven't thought about. It's one of the underlying fundamental issues we have yet to come to grips with."

The core of this effort is a little-known system called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE). Only a few public documents mention it. ADVISE is a research and development program within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), part of its three-year-old "Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and Assessment" portfolio. The TVTA received nearly $50 million in federal funding this year.

DHS officials are circumspect when talking about ADVISE. "I've heard of it," says Peter Sand, director of privacy technology. "I don't know the actual status right now. But if it's a system that's been discussed, then it's something we're involved in at some level."

Data-mining is a key technology

A major part of ADVISE involves data-mining - or "dataveillance," as some call it. It means sifting through data to look for patterns. If a supermarket finds that customers who buy cider also tend to buy fresh-baked bread, it might group the two together. To prevent fraud, credit-card issuers use data-mining to look for patterns of suspicious activity.

What sets ADVISE apart is its scope. It would collect a vast array of corporate and public online information - from financial records to CNN news stories - and cross-reference it against US intelligence and law-enforcement records. The system would then store it as "entities" - linked data about people, places, things, organizations, and events, according to a report summarizing a 2004 DHS conference in Alexandria, Va. The storage requirements alone are huge - enough to retain information about 1 quadrillion entities, the report estimated. If each entity were a penny, they would collectively form a cube a half-mile high - roughly double the height of the Empire State Building.

But ADVISE and related DHS technologies aim to do much more, according to Joseph Kielman, manager of the TVTA portfolio. The key is not merely to identify terrorists, or sift for key words, but to identify critical patterns in data that illumine their motives and intentions, he wrote in a presentation at a November conference in Richland, Wash.

For example: Is a burst of Internet traffic between a few people the plotting of terrorists, or just bloggers arguing? ADVISE algorithms would try to determine that before flagging the data pattern for a human analyst's review.

At least a few pieces of ADVISE are already operational. Consider Starlight, which along with other "visualization" software tools can give human analysts a graphical view of data. Viewing data in this way could reveal patterns not obvious in text or number form. Understanding the relationships among people, organizations, places, and things - using social-behavior analysis and other techniques - is essential to going beyond mere data-mining to comprehensive "knowledge discovery in databases," Dr. Kielman wrote in his November report. He declined to be interviewed for this article.

One data program has foiled terrorists

Starlight has already helped foil some terror plots, says Jim Thomas, one of its developers and director of the government's new National Visualization Analytics Center in Richland, Wash. He can't elaborate because the cases are classified, he adds. But "there's no question that the technology we've invented here at the lab has been used to protect our freedoms - and that's pretty cool."

As envisioned, ADVISE and its analytical tools would be used by other agencies to look for terrorists. "All federal, state, local and private-sector security entities will be able to share and collaborate in real time with distributed data warehouses that will provide full support for analysis and action" for the ADVISE system, says the 2004 workshop report.
Some antiterror efforts die - others just change names

Defense Department

November 2002 - The New York Times identifies a counterterrorism program called Total Information Awareness.

September 2003 - After terminating TIA on privacy grounds, Congress shuts down its successor, Terrorism Information Awareness, for the same reasons.

Department of Homeland Security

February 2003 - The department's Transportation Security Administration (TSA) announces it's replacing its 1990s-era Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS I).

July 2004 - TSA cancels CAPPS II because of privacy concerns.

August 2004 - TSA says it will begin testing a similar system - Secure Flight - with built-in privacy features.

July 2005 - Government auditors charge that Secure Flight is violating privacy laws by holding information on 43,000 people not suspected of terrorism.

A program in the shadows

Yet the scope of ADVISE - its stage of development, cost, and most other details - is so obscure that critics say it poses a major privacy challenge.

"We just don't know enough about this technology, how it works, or what it is used for," says Marcia Hofmann of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. "It matters to a lot of people that these programs and software exist. We don't really know to what extent the government is mining personal data."

Even congressmen with direct oversight of DHS, who favor data mining, say they don't know enough about the program.

"I am not fully briefed on ADVISE," wrote Rep. Curt Weldon (R) of Pennsylvania, vice chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, in an e-mail. "I'll get briefed this week."

Privacy concerns have torpedoed federal data-mining efforts in the past. In 2002, news reports revealed that the Defense Department was working on Total Information Awareness, a project aimed at collecting and sifting vast amounts of personal and government data for clues to terrorism. An uproar caused Congress to cancel the TIA program a year later.

Echoes of a past controversial plan

ADVISE "looks very much like TIA," Mr. Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation writes in an e-mail. "There's the same emphasis on broad collection and pattern analysis."

But Mr. Sand, the DHS official, emphasizes that privacy protection would be built-in. "Before a system leaves the department there's been a privacy review.... That's our focus."

Some computer scientists support the concepts behind ADVISE.

"This sort of technology does protect against a real threat," says Jeffrey Ullman, professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford University. "If a computer suspects me of being a terrorist, but just says maybe an analyst should look at it ... well, that's no big deal. This is the type of thing we need to be willing to do, to give up a certain amount of privacy."

Others are less sure.

"It isn't a bad idea, but you have to do it in a way that demonstrates its utility - and with provable privacy protection," says Latanya Sweeney, founder of the Data Privacy Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University. But since speaking on privacy at the 2004 DHS workshop, she now doubts the department is building privacy into ADVISE. "At this point, ADVISE has no funding for privacy technology."

She cites a recent request for proposal by the Office of Naval Research on behalf of DHS. Although it doesn't mention ADVISE by name, the proposal outlines data-technology research that meshes closely with technology cited in ADVISE documents.

Neither the proposal - nor any other she has seen - provides any funding for provable privacy technology, she adds.

The move could put the Republican-controlled Congress on a collision course with the administration, which has insisted that it is acting legally in monitoring calls and e-mails that might help disrupt future terrorist plots.

The US has been embroiled in a contentious debate over security versus civil liberties since the revelation in December that the National Security Agency had been intercepting communications on US soil since early 2002. The administration says the effort is aimed narrowly at communications involving suspected members of al-Qaeda or their supporters, but in order to identify such suspicious conversations many suspect that the NSA is combing through a far broader range of ordinary calls and e-mails.

On its face, the programme appears to violate the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa), in which Congress required that domestic eavesdropping for intelligence purposes could only be done with warrants from a special court set up under Fisa. Alberto Gonzales, the attorney-general, failed to persuade Democrats and many Republicans in all-day Senate testimony on Monday that the president has inherent wartime powers that allowed him to bypass that requirement.

Mr Specter said his proposed legislation would require the administration to take that issue to the Fisa court. He said the administration’s claim “may be right, but on the other hand they may be wrong”.

He said the Fisa court should determine whether the programme is legal, and if it is not what changes would be required.

Mr Specter’s threat is only the latest sign that the NSA spying revelations have divided Republicans, with some in the party fearing that Mr Bush’s expansive claims may pose a danger to civil liberties. The administration has also been criticized for briefing only congressional leaders and senior members of the intelligence committee on the programme.

But on Wednesday, Mr Gonzales and Michael Hayden, deputy director of national intelligence, gave their first briefing on the surveillance effort to all members of the House intelligence committee, according to Heather Wilson, a Republican on the committee who had called for more complete briefings.

Ms Wilson, who chairs a subcommittee that oversees the NSA, said she was still learning the facts of the programme. But she said it might be time to update the 1978 law on foreign intelligence surveillance.

“Technology is changing, and we have to keep up and keep pace with that technology to make sure our intelligence agencies have the tools they need to keep us safe,” she said.