.. Hayden, a cerebral leader whose specialty is setting broad visions for sprawling government bureaucracies, faced a number of difficult challenges after Sept. 11. Among the obstacles was a legal one: NSA employees had long been technically capable of tracking phone calls that either originated or ended in the United States but they were frustrated at being legally required to stop tracking calls as soon as potential suspects dialed someone in the States, and they could not listen to purely domestic calls.
After Sept. 11, Hayden took a no-excuses attitude, said one former NSA official, and came up with a solution for the legal problem: President Bush could sign a secret authorization.
Hayden presented the plan for a warrantless program to a meeting of his senior managers in October 2001 .. According to former officials familiar with the meeting, legal concerns dominated the discussion, but Hayden was confident that with Bush's authorization under the president's wartime powers, the program would be legal. Such presidential "findings," as the documents are called, are often used for covert activity ..
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