Some editorial comment

The government's response to the NSA spying story is not playing well in the land of newspaper editorials:

From the conservative Chicago Trib:

The government apparently has even bigger plans "to create a database of every call ever made within the nation's borders" to identify and track suspected terrorists.

Think about that. Every phone call ever made.

No, not so fast.

This sounds like a vast and unchecked intrusion on privacy. President Bush's assurance Thursday that the privacy of Americans was being "fiercely protected" was not at all convincing.

From the New York Times:

What we have here is a clandestine surveillance program of enormous size, which is being operated by members of the administration who are subject to no limits or scrutiny beyond what they deem to impose on one another. If the White House had gotten its way, the program would have run secretly until the war on terror ended — that is, forever.

Congress must stop pretending that it has no serious responsibilities for monitoring the situation. The Senate should call back Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and ask him — this time, under oath — about the scope of the program. This time, lawmakers should not roll over when Mr. Gonzales declines to provide answers. The confirmation hearings of Michael Hayden, President Bush's nominee for Central Intelligence Agency director, are also a natural forum for a serious, thorough and pointed review of exactly what has been going on.

From the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson:

At least now we know that the Bush administration's name for spying on Americans without first seeking court approval -- the "terrorist surveillance program" -- isn't an exercise in Orwellian doublespeak after all. It's just a bald-faced lie.

From the editors of the Washington Post:

WHEN THE New York Times revealed the National Security Agency's domestic wiretapping program late last year, President Bush assured the country that the operation was carefully limited to international calls, targeted only al-Qaeda suspects and did not involve snooping on law-abiding Americans. That turns out to be far from the whole truth.

From the conservative Boston Herald:

Since 9/11 the American public has been willing to rely on the assurances of government leaders that they are preserving our privacy while fighting terrorism. Unfortunately, and perhaps understandably, many Americans no longer believe them.

Fron the San Francisco Chronicle:

"THEY HATE our freedoms,'' is one of President Bush's favored rallying cries in the war on terrorism.

More and more, the question is becoming: Which cherished freedoms, precisely, is Bush referring to? His administration's apparent disrespect for what most of us would regard as one of the most fundamental freedoms of all -- a right to privacy -- raises deep concerns about the self-inflicted erosion of our way of life by wide-scale government tracking of phone calls in the name of fighting terrorism.

Once again, Bush has suggested that law-abiding Americans have nothing to worry about. But he's wrong. Voices in both parties in Washington are rightly furious over this latest overstepping of governmental limits.

His administration's National Security Agency has paid three of the largest phone companies -- Verizon, AT&T and BellSouth -- to turn over phone logs by the millions since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The idea is to turn computer programs loose on this personal data to discover patterns of terrorist activity. It's a quantum leap in federal snooping.

This plan, outlined in USA Today, has provoked a furor. Bush's nominee as CIA director, Gen. Michael Hayden, was already facing a tough confirmation hearing for his role in pushing an earlier warrantless eavesdropping project on international calls and e-mails. Now Hayden will be on the hot seat for this much larger policy, as he should be.

In justifying the earlier warrantless surveillance, the president said it was necessary in a fast-moving war. He has done the same thing again, wrapping himself in the cloak of fighting terrorism, as important a battle as there is in the world today. But we must never lose sight of what we are supposed to be defending -- a free society.

Collecting tens of millions of domestic phone records represents a dangerous intrusion into Americans' personal lives. No warrant, no legal justification, no checks and balances -- just a straight dive into your everyday phone records.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Even under the Patriot Act, there are judicially supervised rules on how investigators may use technology — known as "pen registers" and "trap and trace" — that monitor telephone traffic without actually listening in on conversations. So the legality of this program is debatable at best. Congress, which has shown no backbone for challenging the previously revealed NSA program, must press the administration to explain and try to justify this much more pervasive operation.

Of course, the administration can be expected to argue that almost anything is permitted under its expansive notions of the president's powers in the war on terrorism — and, at the same time, that this president has always exercised those powers judiciously. On Thursday, Hayden insisted that "everything that NSA does is lawful and very carefully done," while Bush said that "the privacy of ordinary Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities."

In other words: Trust us. But by now no one in (or out of) Congress should have any faith in the administration's assurances about either its actions or its intentions under this program. As another president once observed: Trust, but verify. Congress needs to fill in the blanks.

And, from the conservative San Diego Union Tribune: