It seems we did have a national debate after all, and the civil libertarians won, or at least they're winning. As David Ignatius notes: "Public uneasiness was suggested by a Washington Post-ABC News poll [last] week showing that 74 percent of those surveyed believe NSA surveillance of telephone records intrudes on the privacy rights of some Americans."
The NY Times adds that "what began on the political fringes only a week ago has built a momentum that even critics say may be unstoppable."
Or rather is unstoppable. And Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren of the House Judiciary Committee put her finger on the "why" of it all: "a grave sense of betrayal," she told the Times, which further observes that "Since the Bush administration, lawmakers had been repeatedly assured that such indiscriminate collection of data did not exist."
This is one of those rare instances in which this White House, to use the vernacular, asked for it. The NSA's data collection itself--the mere existence of a digital vault containing billions of numbers--was never the paramount offense in many civil libertarians' eyes. Glenn Greenwald can recount all the ghost stories of illicit midnight snoop hauntings that his imagination can conjure, but what really steamed so many on the public sidelines was the compulsive secrecy of a program that required virtually none--and that the Security State's chieftains lied to Congress about it.
It now appears that legislative remedies are inevitable. As agreeable as though remedies are, what's downright heartwarming is that so many Obama administration-friendly civil libertarians have been philosophically consistent in their hostility to the NSA's furtive overreach. We all recall when (post-reelection, regrettably) the NY Times nailed the Bush administration for its unwarranted overreach, and we recall as well the unmitigated outrage of left-leaning libertarians. Thankfully, most refused to drift into silence with successive partisan winds. It makes one proud of the left.