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1) The NSA and it's huge banks of computers were tied into all the major phone company switches all over the country and were sifting through every last phone conversation, email and page building huge databases of conversations and how they were linked to each other which is literally George Orwell's "big brother".
In order to get a warrant, you have to show a judge "probable cause". In order to have probable cause you have to have a particular suspect or reasonably definable group of suspects. No judge, even Antonin Scalia, would issue a warrant granting the President the right to listen in on every electronic communication on the planet and then sift through it all in such an over-reaching intrusion on 4th amendment privacy.
Also once that data is collected, it is stored and can be searched for particulars afterwards that weren't considered while recording it.
Listening in on everybody in general sounds innocuous if you think about it superficially but everybody is just a mathematical superset of a whole lot of somebodies (and "nobodies" as well). This means they could pull up conversations from John Kerry, John Edwards, Howard Dean, Terry McAuliffe, Wesley Clarke, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Colin Powell, Bill Richardson, or anybody they disliked or even just didn't entirely trust and listen in - without a warrant.
In this sense, the NSA wire taps were akin to what arms controllers call a "dual use facility". Yes it could listen in on Al Qaeda, but it could also listen in on the Kerry Edwards campaign.
Without a warrant, there will be very little paperwork and we'll probably never know the whole truth.
2) They actually were specifically listening in on political opponents instead of just suspected terrorists.
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