A new seven-member Senate subcommittee received a briefing from the White House Thursday on President George W. Bush’s terrorist surveillance program run by the National Security Agency. As you might expect, none of them are talking about it.

The Senate intelligence committee had decided Tuesday not to investigate the legality of the program, choosing instead to create a subcommittee which would be briefed on the program and to propose a law which would make the program legal and provide Congressional oversight through that same subcommittee.

The program allows for wiretaps without a warrant of phone calls and Internet traffic, one end of which is in the U.S., and one end of which involves a terrorist or an associate, according to the Bush administration and published reports.

“It’s too . . . sensitive to talk about” was the only message from the panel’s vice chairman, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as passed on by his press secretary. A White House spokesman said there would be no comment. — Washington Post

Last week Rockefeller went to NSA on a fact-finding mission and spent seven hours receiving detailed briefings on the program, and the full subcommittee will go to NSA on Monday for a tour and a more detailed briefing.

After spending almost seven hours last week getting answers from more than a dozen NSA lawyers, policymakers and technicians, Rockefeller said in a Tuesday interview that he learned “much, much more” in that session than in briefings at the White House, where the sessions “were flip-chart jobs and not very impressive.” — Washington Post

The program’s legality remains in question. A former Justice Department attorney who had been briefed on the program said Wednesday that he did not believe the legal justification provided by the White House stood up to scrutiny.

David S. Kris, a former associate deputy attorney general who now works at Time Warner Inc., concludes that a National Security Agency domestic spying program is clearly covered by a 1978 law governing clandestine surveillance, according to a legal analysis and e-mails sent to current Justice officials.

Kris, who oversaw national security issues at Justice from 2000 until he left the department in 2003, also wrote that the Bush administration’s contention that Congress had authorized the NSA program by approving the use of force against al-Qaeda was a “weak justification” unlikely to be supported by the courts. — Washington Post

And now that the Senate has decided not to investigate the program’s legality, and proposed a bill to explicitly make it legal, it’s possible that question may never be answered. But if you have nothing to hide, what’s the problem if NSA wants to listen to your overseas phone calls?