Not enough relevant officials were aware of the size and depth of an unprecedented surveillance program started under President George W. Bush, let alone signed off on it, a team of federal inspectors general found.
The Bush White House pulled in a great quantity of information far beyond the warrantless wiretapping previously acknowledged, the IGs reported. They questioned the legal basis for the effort but shielded almost all details on grounds they're still too secret to reveal.
So, nothing obviously illegal, that is. And secret. And the Obama administration is apparently still doing all these things.
I suspect more hype than substance is here, since past media campaigns attempted to portray intercepts of purely foreign communications that happened to cross American soil, communications between lines in America and suspected terrorist-related locations, and basic traffic analysis of domestic calls as some type of "eavesdropping" campaign on Americans.
But it is possible that one (or more) of the programs expanded beyond what it should. I will grant that proper Congressional oversight is necessary to guard against this. Just because there may be no scandal and the government is simply--and properly--listening in on enemy communications and doing other things that don't actually eavesdrop on Americans without warrants, doesn't mean that well placed senators and representatives shouldn't know about it to keep the program from drifting into civil rights violations over time.
UPDATE: My general support for Congresional oversight remains (though it doesn't eliminate politicizing actions years later, it does limit it, I think). But I'm not sure if the program rose to the level of needing oversight:
The former intelligence official familiar with Hayden said Congress has a right to contemporaneous information about all CIA activities. But he said there are so many in such early stages that briefing Congress on every one would be too time consuming for both the CIA and the congressional committees.
Nor am I sure of how broad Congressional oversight must be. This is critical stuff and if just one member of Congress blabs from idiocy or anger, the program is compromised.
