As I suspected, what the NSA did when it broke the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was that it turned ECHELON, a powerful computer system capable of intercepting just about any form of electronic communication, on to the U.S.  Until recently, the government had not used the system on U.S. citizens.  A piece by Raw Story indicates that's what was done regarding the U.N. diplomats at the Security Council during the run up to war.  I'd guess that we're about to learn that the system was turned loose on the entire U.S. communications infrastructure and that the communications of every single American were scanned by this computer behemoth.