In December, it emerged that the NSA was eavesdropping on the contents of phone calls and e-mail messages between Americans on U.S. soil and people abroad. That program was of doubtful legality, and so is this one. As a rule, federal law forbids phone companies from turning over calling records to anyone, and it forbids the government from getting call records without a court order or a national security letter.

So it’s cold comfort to hear Bush say that “the intelligence activities I authorized are lawful.” He said the same thing about the other NSA program. But when the Justice Department undertook an investigation, the White House refused to grant its attorneys the security clearances they needed to proceed. The Bush administration doesn’t trust even Bush administration lawyers to agree the program is kosher.

Even if you don’t care about the privacy of your phone records, you might care that we have a president who feels no obligation to obey the law. You might care that if the government was secretly doing this, it may be doing other things that are even more worrisome. And you might care that one day, we may find that the free society we claim to cherish has become a police state. ~Steve Chapman, Chicago Tribune