What the Newspapers are Saying About Bush's "Data Mining" Operation

NY Times: 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. Most of all, Congress should pass legislation that removes any doubt that this kind of warrantless spying on ordinary Americans is illegal. If the administration finds the current procedures for getting court approval of wiretaps too restrictive, this would be the time to make any needed adjustments.

President Bush began his defense of the N.S.A. program yesterday by invoking, as he often does, Sept. 11. The attacks that day firmed the nation's resolve to protect itself against its enemies, but they did not give the president the limitless power he now claims to intrude on the private communications of the American people.

Washington Post: Congress urgently needs to examine the full range of NSA domestic surveillance. These latest revelations show the error of well-meaning attempts to legislate concerning the NSA's wiretapping program by senators lacking a comprehensive sense of what it is and how it fits into the agency's larger domestic activities. The goal must be to modernize the rules of anti-terrorism surveillance within the United States, allowing for the uses of new technologies unimagined when Congress wrote current law but insisting on proper limits and systemic judicial and legislative oversight. This cannot begin to happen without a sustained congressional effort to find out what the NSA is doing.

Eugene Robinson, Washington Post: 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.

Step back for a moment. There's an understandable tendency, with this administration, to succumb to a kind of "outrage fatigue." Pre-cooked intelligence on Iraq, secret CIA prisons, Abu Ghraib -- the accretion is numbing, and it's easy just to say "there they go again" and count the months until the Decider heads home to Texas for good. Bush and his people have tried to turn flouting the law into a virtue if it's a law they find inconvenient. They've tried to radically change our concept of privacy. We already knew the NSA was somehow monitoring phone calls, so what's the big deal?

The big deal is that now we know that the administration -- I'll say "apparently," although if the report were untrue I think the president would have denied it -- is keeping track of the phone calls of millions of citizens who have nothing at all to do with terrorism. Bush has tried to convince us that the overwhelming majority of Americans are not affected by domestic surveillance, but now we know that the opposite is true: The overwhelming majority of us are .