The Washington Post reports that AG Alberto Gonzales and White House Counsel Harriett Miers each denied in telephone calls to Rep. Jane Harman that there was "a broader program or an additional program out there involving surveillance of U.S. persons" beyond the known NSA surveillance program.

  This is an interesting development, although exactly what it means isn't clear to me. Given that the statements were made to Harman over the phone and reported by her from memory, we don't know precisely what was said. The details might matter. For example, a statement that there are no additional "surveillance" programs might be quite different from a statement that there are no additional "electronic surveillance" programs. "Surveillance" would seem to be a general term, but "electronic surveillance" is a term of art defined in FISA that is mostly limited to acquiring the contents of communications. See 50 U.S.C. 1801(f). So, for example, a datamining program that used non-content envelope information from Internet and telephone communications to try to look for patterns and links of communications might sound like a "surveillance" program in a popular sense. On the other hand, it technically would not be an "electronic surveillance" program as the term is used in FISA.