That sound you don't hear is one hand clapping. The Bush administration has surprisingly reversed itself on its anti-terrorism policy of eavesdropping on Americans without warrants, something that certainly deserves support and praise. But it would be unwise to get carried away.

After all, this is the reversal of a policy that never should have been adopted in the first place. While Americans certainly want their government to root out terrorists and while they understand that tapping phone calls and e-mails to and from the United States may be necessary in some cases, many don't want such surveillance to be done without regard to the law.

This high disdain for legal procedures in the pursuit of warrantless surveillance has been going on for years, and it has been as shocking as it has been unnecessary. The nation lost much on 9/11 and it does not have to junk its traditional civil-liberty protections to achieve security, or so many Americans believe.

Unfortunately, the Bush administration is not among the believers. After the attacks in 2001, the executive branch asserted a theory of executive ascendancy that, in the name of fighting the war on terror, was bolder and more far-reaching than any of its recent predecessors. The presidency has become something of an imperial institution that recognizes no restraints on its power.

The examples are numerous, ranging from the more than 800 presidential signing statements that seek to override the plain intent of legislation passed by Congress to the arrest of a U.S. citizen on American soil and his detention for years without any contact with counsel in flagrant disregard of the Constitution.

The clandestine spying on Americans was all of a piece with this reckless behavior. But a procedure always existed to do legally what the administration was doing extra-legally -- a secret court that oversees the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, and which is empowered to approve wiretaps and searches.

Yet the administration couldn't even abide this formality. Although suggestions were made that the court could not act quickly enough in urgent cases, the administration did not attempt to change the law -- it just blew it off because it felt it could.

Now supposedly an arrangement has been worked out that allows the court to oversee the National Security Agency's spying program "with the speed and agility necessary to protect the nation from al-Qaida," as Attorney General Alberto Gonzales put it. Why this couldn't be done years ago and is happening now is not hard to guess: Congress is in the hands of the Democrats.

The details of the new program are murky and it must be taken on faith that this is progress -- a very big leap of faith indeed, given recent history. The administration, of course, does not concede that it did anything wrong. In other words, use the hand that's not clapping to cross your fingers.