Senator Kohl on NSA Data Mining Project

Herb Kohl issued this statement today:

We all agree that al-Qaeda operatives must be tracked wherever they may be, but the President’s unprecedented intrusion into the lives of millions of Americans is chilling. If these phone records were collected without the legal authority to do so, it is a contradiction of our basic constitutional rights and expectations of privacy. The law - and our entire system of checks and balances -- makes clear that the President does not have unlimited authority, yet he consistently refuses to seek consent for these broad and far-reaching government programs. This pattern troubles me and raises many grave questions.

How brave of him. I am intrigued that this is news today. These 'revelations' are not new. The New York Times and NBC News reported on this program in December of last year.