Tomorrow night at 9:00 p.m. Eastern, PBS's Frontline is broadcasting a new documentary entitled Spying on the Home Front, which examines the numerous ways in which the government's domestic surveillance powers have been vastly expanded since 9/11. Most of that expansion has taken place in secret, with virtually no oversight of any kind, and has remained almost completely shielded from any public debate.
...
Relatedly, the documentary focuses on one of the critical and still-unresolved aspects of the NSA scandal. Every time -- literally, each and every time -- administration officials such as Alberto Gonzales answered questions about the scope and breadth of the warrantless NSA surveillance program (most prominently when Gonzales appeared before the Judiciary Committee once the NSA program was revealed), they very carefully qualified their answers by emphasizing that the information they were providing was confined to "the specific NSA program" which the President acknowledged in light of the New York Times story.
Thus, when they were asked whether they were eavesdropping on purely domestic communications, or engaging in massive data mining and/or driftnets, or monitoring email communications or mail, administration officials would deny that such activities were part of the specific NSA warrantless eavesdropping program the President confirmed. They would not, however, deny in general that the administration is engaging in such activities, claiming that national security concerns prevented them from disclosing any information other than information about the specific "program which the President confirmed" (after the NYT disclosed its existence).
Put simply, what we do not know about the administration's domestic surveillance activities -- meaning how our own Government spies on us and maintains data bases reflecting our activities on U.S. soil -- vastly outweighs what we do know. But what is beyond doubt is that those activities have increased continuously in the last two decades, and that expansion has accelerated massively since the 9/11 attacks. And not only do "we" -- the citizenry -- know very little about these surveillance activities, the Congress seems to know almost as little, and does not appear to have much of an interest in finding out more, and certainly has evinced little interest in informing the public about these matters.
