Hayden says the NSA program was criticized by the 9/11 Commish

[liveoaktx]

Here's an article about that
http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/earlywarning/2005/12/inside_nsas_wor.html

Certainly the most serious NSA failure was the Joint Inquiry's discovery that one of the future 9/11 hijackers "communicated with a known terrorist facility in the Middle East while he was living in the United States." Yet the intelligence community did not identify the domestic origin of those communications prior to 9/11. The reason, the Joint Inquiry found, was a "gap … between NSA’s coverage of foreign communications and the FBI’s coverage of domestic communications …neither agency focused on the importance of identifying and then ensuring coverage of communications between the United States and suspected terrorist-associated facilities abroad …"