Protecting right to privacy

Saturday, April 18, 2009 | 2:08 a.m.

Although the 9/11 attacks prompted sweeping changes in national security designed to thwart future terrorist events in this country, there remains a fine line between protecting the United States from those threats and violating Americans’ individual freedoms.

That’s why it was disturbing to read Thursday in The New York Times that the National Security Agency in recent months intercepted domestic e-mail messages and phone calls from Americans on a scale that exceeded legal limits set by Congress last year, unnamed government officials said.

Attorney General Eric Holder this year sought approval from a national security court, which oversees agency wiretaps, to renew the surveillance program after the Justice Department said it had corrected the problems. The intelligence agency also told the Times the wiretap operations are lawful.

But the Times reported that the extent, if any, to which Americans’ privacy was unlawfully violated remains unknown. One government official said the agency inadvertently targeted groups of Americans without proper court authority. If true, that certainly crossed the line.

The wiretap problems reportedly were blamed in part on technical glitches that sometimes made it difficult to distinguish between communications inside this country and those overseas.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, made the right move in response to the story by calling for a hearing to investigate the agency’s practices, even though members of Congress have received secret briefings on the wiretap problem since February.

Although the agency plays a crucial role in keeping the U.S. safe from terrorist attacks, it should correct wiretap problems as soon as possible rather than let them fester. The failure to take immediate corrective action creates situations where Americans are unnecessarily targeted.