Mr. President, We Can Handle the Truth

[Commentary] The newly adopted argument for US spying on foreign allies was that the President had no idea this was going on and that it was stopped. Now we weren't just spying on the Germans and others -- we were lying to them. And the White House was asking the American people to accept ignorance as its excuse.

What a fine choice. Either the President didn't know about programs he should have been aware of, or he knew and not only OKed the overreach, but then lied about it. This astonishingly lame response was then compounded by an idea that the President was considering reforms that would ban eavesdropping on presidents and prime ministers of allies. Quite apart from raising the tough question of who our "real" allies are or defining who is fair game for spying, this policy tweak is not reform but spin. What if there were 20 allies who qualified? Does this mean we solve the NSA surveillance overreach problem by exempting a small, pre-selected group out of hundreds of millions from the data and phone-records eavesdropping and warehousing efforts of the US government? However, the core issues of the gross and excessive surveillance associated with the NSA revelations are not about spying on friends. Wholesale harvesting of the emails and phone records of Americans is a dangerous departure from the principles of limiting government access to private information that has existed since the beginnings of the republic. Creating back doors by which Americans can be eavesdropped on via collecting overseas data resources is another worrisome dimension of these programs. Serially violating the privacy of tens of millions of foreign citizens is another. So is the suggestion that the threat of terrorism warrants such sweeping violations.