A call to account

GEN. MICHAEL V. HAYDEN, President Bush’s nominee to head the Central Intelligence Agency, may want to call off his charm offensive with members of Congress. The Air Force general isn’t likely to make much headway after the revelation that the National Security Agency, which he used to head, not only eavesdropped on telephone conversations and e-mail messages of Americans suspected of ties with foreign terrorists, it also induced telephone companies to turn over the records of billions -- that’s with a “b” -- of domestic calls.

On Thursday, USA Today reported that after 9/11, the NSA asked telecommunications companies to turn over the “call-detail” records of millions of customers. The records -- essentially a list of phone numbers -- reportedly have been used by the agency to identify patterns that would help identify terrorists. The newspaper said that the data turned over by AT&T;, Verizon and BellSouth did not include customers’ names or personal information. But it would not be hard for the agency to connect those dots.

Until now, the Bush administration’s defense of its warrantless eavesdropping program has centered on two assertions: first, that the program targets only international phone conversations and e-mails; and second, that it involves a relatively small number of Americans linked to foreign terrorists. Now it appears that this program is a vast dragnet that ensnares the innocent as well as the (possibly) guilty. The administration’s explanations are no longer operative, to use a phrase its agents will understand.

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.