Today the New York Times reports that since the FISA Reauthorization Act passed last summer, giving the Bush administration after-the-fact authorization for its warrantless wiretapping program, the NSA has nonetheless continued to violate Americans’ civil liberties and conduct unauthorized surveillance of our phones and emails. Risen and Lichtblau use seriously alarming phrases to describe the violation of rights, saying that they were “significant and systemic” and that surveillance “went beyond the broad legal limits.”

The invasion of civil liberties is a malignant behavior. Everything we had seen prior to last year’s FISA legislation suggested that when the executive branch has given license to violate Americans’ liberties, that license is used. The increase in power, along with a decrease in oversight, was certain to lead to other abuses. And now it has.

Glenn Greenwald makes this point clearly:

These widespread eavesdropping abuses enabled by the 2008 FISA bill — a bill passed with the support of Barack Obama along with the entire top Democratic leadership in the House, including Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, and substantial numbers of Democratic Senators — aren’t a bug in that bill, but rather, were one of the central features of it.  Everyone knew that the FISA bill which Congressional Democrats passed — and which George Bush and Dick Cheney celebrated — would enable these surveillance abuses.  That was the purpose of the law:  to gut the safeguards in place since the 1978 passage of FISA, destroy the crux of the oversight regime over executive surveillance of Americans, and enable and empower unchecked government spying activities.  This was not an unintended and unforeseeable consequence of that bill.  To the contrary, it was crystal clear that by gutting FISA’s safeguards, the Democratic Congress was making these abuses inevitable.

But that these abuses were predictable is not the point. We are still, after all, talking about the behavior of the United States government towards the citizens of the United States. This is no trifling thing. It wasn’t in December of 2005 when Risen and Lichtblau first reported on the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. It was not a small thing when Chris Dodd’s efforts stalled retroactive immunity and a bad FISA bill for nearly nine months from October 2007 to July 2008. And it isn’t a small thing now. This is a fundamental question of the rule of law and the protection our Constitution and our laws afford citizens from abuses of power.

Digby writes, “The safeguards were so confusing they caused them to “inadvertently” do even more unconstitutional spying than before. Awesome.” Yes, the bad FISA bill that was passed last summer augured this behavior by removing most of the minuscule check on intelligence gathering powers within the US and of American citizens. But that the NSA found a way to violate even the remnants of FISA limitations is appalling. There must be recourse and it has to go beyond the administration’s assurances to the Times that the NSA’s actions have been stopped and corrected.

One of the only things that gives me the slightest hope that something will actually done, publicly and through legislation, by Congress is that the NSA actually illegally wiretapped a sitting US Congressman. Even feckless members of Congress should be able to be righteously indignant at the violations of civil liberties of one of their colleagues.

The NSA’s behavior is unacceptable. It’s infuriating. And it shouldn’t be accepted by anyone today any more than we accepted the Bush administration’s illegal warrantless wiretapping program.