The Department of Justice Inspector General will conduct an internal review of how the department handled information gained from President Bush’s controversial terrorist surveillance program, but will not review whether the program is actually legal, officials said Monday.

The program, created by executive order in 2001 and revealed in news reports in December 2005, collects international calls to and from the U.S. made or received by those believed to have connections to terrorist groups. Dozens of lawsuits have been filed against the government and telephone companies alleged to have assisted the government in implementing the program.

Inspector General Glenn A. Fine sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee chairman and ranking member Monday stating that the White House had finally granted security clearances for investigators necessary to review the program which he had requested from the White House Oct. 20.

The internal review “will examine the Department’s controls and use of information related to the program and the Department’s compliance with legal requirements governing the program,” the letter said.

Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said “We expect that this review will assist Justice Department personnel in ensuring that the department’s activities comply with the legal requirements that govern the operation of the program.” — Associated Press

Translation: We’re going to look at how the intercepts from this program were handled internally, but not whether the program is legal.

Prediction: In six months to a year, the OIG will release a report stating that it could find no evidence that DOJ mishandled intelligence products from the program. They will announce a few weak internal controls and a plan to correct them; there’s almost always some of that.

Democrats, predictably, are out saying the review doesn’t go far enough. “A full investigation into the program as a whole, not just the DOJ’s involvement, will be necessary,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) told the AP.

Ryan Singel of Wired News, who published a copy of Fine’s letter, speculates that the reason the White House is allowing the review to go forward is to keep it “contained and controllable.”

And the newly constituted Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which has been a long time coming, was briefed on the program last week. Guess what they have to say?

One member, Lanny J. Davis, a White House lawyer in the Clinton administration, said in an interview that he was “pleasantly surprised” by the privacy protections built into the program. He declined to discuss the program in detail because of secrecy restrictions.

“I was astonished at the extent to which they are all concerned about the legal and civil liberties and privacy implications of what they were doing,” Davis said. “It was a constant theme of concern, awareness and training way beyond what I expected.”

Davis said the briefings convinced him that the program had been carefully constructed from the start. “It was clear that as they thought about it, they put it together in a way that minimized problems to the best extent that they could,” he said. — Washington Post

Hey, maybe this terrorist surveillance thing isn’t so bad after all. Look, they’ve got government bureaucrats protecting our privacy from themselves.