NEGROPONTE LIED, PEOPLE SPIED. Dan Eggen at The Washington Post notes that as recently as a year ago Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte was assuring people that the NSA was "absolutely not" monitoring domestic calls which, of course, it was. What's more, he actually said this in congressional testimony which used to be considered more serious than run of the mill lying. I don't see any particular reason to trust a group of people who've repeatedly shown themselves to be untrustworthy to conduct a potentially abusable program, in secret, without abusing it.
UPDATE: Sorry -- don't blog while angry. Negroponte lied to reporters, not in congressional testimony (although there was the 2001, "to this day, I do not believe there were death squads operating in Honduras" incident). It was Attorney-General Al Gonzalez's congressional testimony that the article discusses and he was evasive.
--Matthew Yglesias
