Senator Orrin Hatch answered charges surrounding the NSA surveillance programs by revealing that at least two FISA judges have been kept informed of at least the NSA phone call database. The revelation answers critics of the Bush administration's efforts to use datamining to detect terrorist sleeper cells:

Two judges on the secretive court that approves warrants for intelligence surveillance were told of the broad monitoring programs that have raised recent controversy, a Republican senator said Tuesday, connecting a court to knowledge of the collecting of millions of phone records for the first time. ...

Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said that at least two of the chief judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had been informed since 2001 of White House-approved National Security Agency monitoring operations.

"None raised any objections, as far as I know," said Hatch, a member of a special Intelligence Committee panel appointed to oversee the NSA's work.

Hatch made the comment in answering a question in an interview about recent reports of the government compiling lists of Americans' phone calls. When pressed later, Hatch suggested he was also speaking broadly of the administration's terror-related monitoring.

Asked if the judges somehow approved the operations, Hatch said, "That is not their position, but they were informed."

After all the concern that the Bush administration had hijacked the call data with no oversight, we now find out that the FISA court had known of the project the entire time. Will this stop the criticism of the program? Probably not, but it should reduce some of the hysteria we've seen about it.

I think that this is good news, and not just politically. The first NSA program revealed doesn't trouble me in the least; surveilling suspected terrorists in real time is nothing more than good wartime intelligence work. The phone database, however, has the potential for more damage to civil liberties if used improperly. I know that the administration does not require legal permission to compile this data and use it, but this effort should have more oversight to protect against abuses than a simple "Trust Me".

And now we see that the Bush administration agrees, involving FISA all along. Well, like Bush's centrism on immigration, don't expect it to change any minds, but at least we won't have to keep hearing about the datamining project for much longer.

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