After a few days’ respite, the Times is back in attack mode:

In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month. But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators . . . Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans’ privacy.

The blame game:

More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, including some in the small circle who knew of the secret program and how it played out at the F.B.I., said the torrent of tips led them to few potential terrorists inside the country they did not know of from other sources and diverted agents from counterterrorism work they viewed as more productive.

The NSA fires back:

Intelligence officials disagree with any characterization of the program’s results as modest, said Judith A. Emmel, a spokeswoman for the office of the director of national intelligence. Ms. Emmel cited a statement at a briefing last month by Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the country’s second-ranking intelligence official and the director of the N.S.A. when the program was started. [Hayden said:] “I can say unequivocally that we have gotten information through this program that would not otherwise have been available.”

There are two things worth noting here: (1) The data collected by the NSA was sent to the proper authority (the FBI), so there’s no allegation that the data was being used by the CIA to spy on Americans; and (2) there’s no allegation that the FBI, as a result of using the NSA’s data, arrested innocent Americans.