Gonzales defended the legality of the program to committee members, including Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-PA), who challenged the NSA domestic spying, arguing federal law "has a forceful and blanket prohibition against any electronic surveillance without a court order."
Specter went on to suggest that the special court established by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) review the legality of the NSA program.
In addition to the legal scrutiny it has received, the NSA program has recently been faulted for its apparent lack of efficacy. According to intelligence sources interviewed by the Washington Post, nearly all of the thousands of international calls by Americans that were subject to NSA eavesdropping turned out to be investigative dead ends.
The Post article notes that the program impacts many more individuals than those 5,000 or so who had their phone calls recorded, as "[c]omputer controlled systems collect and sift basic information about hundreds of thousands of faxes, e-mails and telephone calls into and out of the United States before selecting the ones for scrutiny by human eyes and ears." The program, it seems, has resulted in little more than the accumulation of enormous amounts of data about harmless communications that is stored by the federal government.