The Questions

The Right Questions: Question One

Tony Snow: Well, in this particular case, again, we're neither confirming or denying the existence of the program. The President was pretty clear --I mean, I'll just -- this is where I will reiterate the points he made yesterday, which is number one, we don't listen to domestic phone calls without court approval. You have all reported that, that the allegations in USA Today have nothing to do with listening in....via Holden's obsession

Dana Perino: There is no listening-in on domestic phone calls without court approval...The government has no interest in knowing what innocent Americans are talking about on their domestic phone calls.

Stephen Hadley: I can't, sitting here, confirm or deny the claims that are in the USA Today story. But it's very interesting what that story does not claim. It does not claim that the government was listening on domestic phone calls. It does not claim that names were passed, that addresses were passed, that content was passed. It's really about calling records, if you read the story--who was called when and how long did they talk. And these are business records that have been held by the courts not to be protected by a right of privacy. And there are a variety of ways in which those records lawfully can be provided to the government.

Of course they don't "listen to domestic phone calls". You cannot "listen" to numbers passing over a fiber optic cable. However, you can certainly capture the numbers that, if decoded correctly, can be transformed into audible sounds of conversations.

DO NOT ASK THIS QUESTION:

Does the Terrorist Surveillance program capture domestic conversations?

ASK THIS QUESTION:

Does any program within the purview of the NSA capture the content of domestic conversations in digital format?