In fact, my client Binney warned that the massive domestic data collection began under Gen. Michael Hayden, Alexander's predecessor:

Binney, for his part, believes that the agency now stores copies of all e-mails transmitted in America, in case the government wants to retrieve the details later. In the past few years, the N.S.A. has built enormous electronic-storage facilities in Texas and Utah. Binney says that an N.S.A. e-mail database can be searched with “dictionary selection,” in the manner of Google. After 9/11, he says, “General Hayden reassured everyone that the N.S.A. didn’t put out dragnets, and that was true. It had no need—it was getting every fish in the sea.”

(Emphasis added.)

Moreover, Drake, Binney and Wiebe revealed that the NSA's massive domestic spying operation is as inefficient and expensive as it is unconstitutional. They spoke out in a brilliant piece by Tim Shorrock for The Nation:



NSA intelligence basically stopped in its tracks when they canceled ThinThread,” says Wiebe, sitting next to Binney at an Olive Garden restaurant just a stone’s throw from NSA headquarters in Columbia, Maryland. “And the people who paid for it were those who died on 9/11.” The NSA Four are now speaking out for the first time about the corporate corruption that led to this debacle and sparked their decision to blow the whistle. In exclusive interviews with The Nation, they have described a toxic mix of bid-rigging, cronyism and fraud involving senior NSA officials and several of the nation’s largest intelligence contractors. They have also provided an inside look at how Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), the government’s fourth-largest contractor, squandered billions of dollars on a vast data-mining scheme that never produced an iota of intelligence.

The WaPo article implies that Alexander began hoarding hundreds of millions of Americans communications in 2005 to gather intelligence in Iraq. (How collecting hundreds of millions of innocent communications would assist in gleaning intelligence on possible attacks in Iraq is a question no government official has been able to answer). But, the reality is that NSA's massive domestic data collection began almost immediately after 9/11 and has continued unabated since. Bush claimed the power to spy on innocent Americans as some inherent executive power (it is not) and now Obama claims the FISA Amendments Act and PATRIOT Act allow the spying (they do not). But for innocent Americans whose data the government hoards, both Presidents and Congress have crossed partisan lines to consistently and secretly cast Americans' privacy aside for over a decade.