Editorial - The Eavesdropping Continues - NYTimes.com: Via NYTimes.com .

Once again, the country is learning about how the federal government has been exceeding its legal authority and violating Americans’ most basic rights in the name of fighting terrorism.

In a disturbing article in The Times on Wednesday, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau said that Congressional investigations suggest that the National Security Agency continues to routinely collect Americans’ telephone calls and e-mail messages — perhaps by the millions.

These sweeps seem unconnected to specific terrorism investigations, and the communications are entirely domestic. The law does not allow fishing trips through Americans’ communications and only permits the government to read e-mails or listen to phone calls in which one party is “reasonably believed” to be outside the United States.

The government offered its usual response: Oops. A spokesman for the intelligence community said any “overcollection” was inadvertent and “when such errors are identified,” they are quickly corrected.

That excuse wore thin long ago. We heard it when the F.B.I. was caught abusing its power to issue “national security letters” to short-circuit constitutional protections. We heard it in April, when the Obama administration first acknowledged that the N.S.A. was exceeding even the expanded authority it was given last year to monitor international calls and e-mail traffic.

Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey, who leads the House panel that oversees intelligence agencies’ operations, was right when he said that “some actions are so flagrant that they can’t be accidental.”

The Times article reported that since 2005, intelligence analysts have used a database called Pinwale, which systematically archives both foreign and domestic e-mail messages by the millions — without regard for whether they are domestic or international or have anything to do with an actual investigation.

Mr. Holt is doing the right thing by pressing for an inquiry. But lawmakers should be clear about how this happened: last year, 293 members of the House and 69 senators voted for a dangerous and mostly unnecessary expansion of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which protected Americans from unwarranted government spying for 30 years.

President George W. Bush started violating that law shortly after 9/11 when he authorized the N.S.A. to conduct domestic wiretapping without first getting the required warrant. When that program was exposed by The Times in late 2004, the Bush team began pressuring Congress to give retroactive legal cover to the eavesdropping operation and to the telecommunications companies that participated in it.

Read Original Article:(Via NYTimes.com .)