Bush gives his two cents on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. I love how he bangs on the podium for effect. You cannot expect phone companies to participate if they feel like they're gonna be sued. - Bush The phrasing and tense of that statement are amusing. The "participation" has already occurred. If Bush had said "We couldn't expect phone companies to participate if they felt like they were gonna be sued." - he would have admitted wrong doing. Bush is commenting on FISA (The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act). Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act - Wikipedia Point 1: How many conversations were intercepted? It's a pity that word wiretap is often used in this situation. Watergate involved things like wiretapping. Wiretapping brings to mind a 70s cop movie and a guy with a small tool kit in a basement intercepting calls from a single phone line. This situation is nothing of the sort. Digital lines carrying a gigantic number of conversations were "tapped". The number of calls could be in the millions, tens of millions or fractions of billions. How many calls were involved? The information about the number isn't known to the public. Point 2: What percentage of the calls were domestic? The president mentions the words "overseas" and "foreigners". Subtlety isn't a hallmark of the Bush team. I bet that (again) the niceties of the law were ignored. The Bush Administration must have thought "We gotta get access to as many phone calls as we can." The problem with drift nets is that they catch absolutely everything in their path - and it's likely that the Administration simply grabbed whatever calls they could: foreign or domestic. The phrase "evil doers" can't be used to describe the people talking. The calls featured ordinary people talking to whoever: a husband, a wife, the office, the video store, grandma. Who knows? Your mom. What percentage of the calls were domestic? The percentage of calls that were domestic isn't known to the public. Poi...