In a recently released report, a team of inspector generals concluded that oversite into Bush's surveillance was restricted to a very few, and in particular criticizing John Yoo, deputy assistant attorney general, who wrote many of the memos defending the policy.

From the article:

The report went on to say "that Yoo's boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, was not aware until March 2004 of the exact nature of the intelligence operations beyond wiretapping that he had been approving for the previous two and a half years."

From the article:

Most of the intelligence leads generated under what was known as the "President's Surveillance Program" did not have any connection to terrorism, the report said. But FBI agents told the authors that the "mere possibility of the leads producing useful information made investigating the leads worthwhile."

From the article:

"The only piece of the intelligence-gathering operation acknowledged by the Bush White House was the wiretapping-without-warrants effort. The administration acknowledged in 2005 that it had allowed the National Security Agency to intercept international communications that passed through U.S. cables without seeking court orders."

From the article:

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden — the primary architect of the program — told the report's authors that the surveillance was "extremely valuable" in preventing further al-Qaida attacks. Hayden said the operations amounted to an "early warning system" allowing top officials to make critical judgments and carefully allocate national security resources to counter threats. However, information gathered by the secret program played a limited role in the FBI's overall counterterrorism efforts, according to the report. Very few CIA analysts even knew about the program and therefore were unable to fully exploit it in their counterterrorism work, the report said.

Report: Too few officials knew of surveillance - Yahoo! News