I'm with Feingold (and Patrick Henry): Give me liberty or give me death!

Right after I have a slug of Victory Gin. The Times on Christmas eve morning:

But the N.S.A.'s backdoor access to major telecommunications switches on American soil with the cooperation of major corporations represents a significant expansion of the agency's operational capability, according to current and former government officials.

So, the scope of the Bush surveillance program is larger than Bush told us, and the first wave of VRWC talking points is breaking down. What a surprise.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.

So, the amount of data captured by the Bush surveillance program is larger than they told us. More talking points breaking down. What a surprise.

Since the disclosure last week of the N.S.A.'s domestic surveillance program, President Bush and his senior aides have stressed that his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to the monitoring of international phone and e-mail communications involving people with known links to Al Qaeda.

So, Bush didn't tell us the whole story. What a surprise.

What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.

And what could they be mining?

"If they get content, that's useful to them too, but the real plum is going to be the transaction data and the traffic analysis," he said.

"If they get content," seems a little cavalier to me. And what does this do for the legal status of the program if the warrant isn't for content? And the FBI, at least, is legally mandated to store this stuff forever, and I'd be surprised if the NSA didn't work the same way. So if they aren't reading your content today, be sure they'll get around to it sooner or later.

Administration officials maintain that the system set up by Congress in 1978 under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act does not give them the speed and flexibility to respond fully to terrorist threats at home.

And nobody has ever explained why retroactive court orders in 72 hours under FISA isn't enough. Even a rubber stamp is too much for these guys' delicate sensibilities?

Several officials said that after President Bush's order authorizing the N.S.A. program, senior government officials arranged with officials of some of the nation's largest telecommunications companies to gain access to switches that act as gateways at the borders between the United States' communications networks and international networks. The identities of the corporations involved could not be determined.

How odd. Since they're the largest ones, and there aren't very many of those, what possible reason could there be to keep the corporations secret--If this program is as legal, as innocuous, and as justified as some say?

Perhaps we could ask Scalito what he thinks of all this at the confirmation hearings?