The government’s spying on Americans began before 9/11 (confirmed here and here. And see this)

As the former head of the NSA’s global digital intelligence gathering program – William Binney – said:

“[NSA] management had made the plan to spy on the United States and the people of the United States even before 9/11.

Then – when 9/11 occurred – that was the pure excuse for them to go in and say now, telecoms, we really need the data now to be able to protect the United States from terrorism.

And that was simply false to begin with. We had no problem at all identifying these people from the beginning. That was absolutely false. But that was the pretext they used to get that process running.”