The latest revelation on the electronic surveillance the Bush administration is carrying out against Americans at home is that three of the major phone companies have provided the National Security Agency with records of millions of calls made by customers in the United States.

In the name of searching for al-Qaida operatives after 9/11, the NSA demanded and has been receiving domestic phone records from Verizon, AT&T and BellSouth, according to a story first reported Thursday by USA Today. All of this has occurred without the use of court orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court or any other judicial authority.

The only company with the guts to question the legality of the administration's action was Qwest, which declined to provide its records. The other three cravenly handed over what the NSA asked for, in spite of regular assurances to clients of dedication to protection of their privacy.

Pennsylvania's Sen. Arlen Specter, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, intends to cast light on this affair by summoning the heads of the companies before his panel.

The matter is likely to have fallout at the hearings May 18 before the Senate Intelligence Committee of Gen. Michael V. Hayden, former head of the NSA, nominated by President Bush to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The fact that Gen. Hayden presided for years, presumably without question, over this mass surveillance and accumulation of data on the phone calls of millions of Americans, without court sanction, calls into question the wisdom of making him head of the CIA.

Absent evidence to the contrary, Gen. Hayden is not someone with sufficient respect for the civil rights of Americans to be put into a position of such responsibility, given the role of the CIA in intelligence gathering at home and abroad. The CIA is forbidden to collect intelligence on American citizens; the NSA is forbidden by FISA to bug the phones and e-mail of American citizens without a court order. The NSA, under Gen. Hayden's leadership, ignored this requirement.

The administration underlined its disregard for logic and justice inherent in its approach to surveillance when the Justice Department informed a member of Congress on Wednesday that it had been forced to close an investigation into the conduct of government lawyers who approved the NSA's domestic surveillance program. The reason was the NSA had refused to give investigators the security clearance they needed for access to the necessary information.

That is to say, an office of the U.S. Department of Justice was refused clearance by the U.S. National Security Agency to examine the activities of Justice lawyers ruling on the legality of NSA actions.

Basically, in the face of an assault on Americans' rights to privacy by the Bush administration, rights based in the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights, the courts have been pushed out of the way. Mr. Bush ignored the requirement to obtain FISA court orders before bugging American citizens. Now the NSA feels free to ignore federal government procedures for the Justice Department to look into the legality of its actions.

We count on Sen. Specter and other members of Congress to pursue this issue with courage. They could start by questioning Gen. Hayden rigorously and then, absent evidence that he does not share the administration's disposition to ignore Americans' rights, turn him down for the CIA post.

That would be a good start at rolling back this assault on Americans' rights.