BREAKING A PROMISE ON SURVEILLANCE It is just a technical matter, the Obama administration says: We just need to make a slight change in a law to make clear that we have the right to see the names of anyone's e-mail correspondents and their Web browsing history without the messy complication of asking a judge for permission. It is far more than a technical change. The administration's request, reported Thursday in The Washington Post, is an unnecessary and disappointing step backward toward more intrusive surveillance from a president who promised something very different during the 2008 campaign. In a 1993 update to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, Congress said that Internet service providers have to turn over to the FBI, on request, 'electronic communication transactional records.' The government says this includes the e-mail records of their subscribers, specifically the addresses to which e-mail messages were sent, and the times and dates. (The content of the messages can remain private.) It may also include Web browsing records. To get this information, the FBI simply has to ask for it in the form of a national security letter, which is an administrative request that does not require a judge's signature. But there was an inconsistency in the writing of the 1993 law. One section said that Internet providers had to turn over this information, but the next section, which specified what the FBI could request, left out electronic communication records. In 2008, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion saying this discrepancy meant the FBI could no longer ask for the information. Many Internet providers stopped turning it over. Now the Obama administration has asked Congress to make clear that the FBI can ask for it. These national security letters are the same vehicles that the Bush administration used after the Sept. 11 attacks to demand that libraries turn over the names of books that people had checked out. The FBI used these letters hundreds of thousands of times to demand records of phone calls and other communications, and the Pentagon used them to get records from banks and consumer credit agencies. Internal investigations of both agencies found widespread misuse of the power, and little oversight into how it was wielded. President Barack Obama campaigned for office on an explicit promise to rein in these abuses. 'There is no reason we cannot fight terrorism while maintaining our civil liberties,' his campaign wrote in a 2008 position paper. 'As president, Barack Obama would revisit the Patriot Act to ensure that there is real and robust oversight of tools like National Security Letters, sneak-and-peek searches, and the use of the material witness provision.' Where is the 'robust oversight' that voters were promised? Earlier this year, the administration successfully pushed for key provisions of the Patriot Act to be renewed for another year without changing a word. Voters had every right to expect the president would roll back authority that had been clearly abused, like national security letters. But instead of implementing reasonable civil liberties protections, like taking requests for e-mail surveillance before a judge, the administration is proposing changes to the law that will allow huge numbers of new electronic communications to be examined with no judicial oversight. Democrats in Congress can remind Obama of his campaign promises by refusing this request. GOV. PATERSON'S NON-EXONERATION Gov. David Paterson's team has said many absurd things about his office's attempt to interfere with assault charges against one of Paterson's closest aides, but perhaps the most absurd of all was the claim that he was 'exonerated' by the report issued by the former chief judge of New York state. It is true that Judith Kaye, the retired chief judge of the State Court of Appeals, said she was not recommending criminal charges against Paterson or any of the other people on the government payroll who seemed to do everything they could short of outright threats to stop a Bronx woman from pursuing the assault charges against the aide, David Johnson. Why she chose to do that is a bit baffling in light of the portrait she painted of government officials abusing the public trust, exhibiting appalling judgment and apparently perjuring themselves during the investigation. But that was her decision, and we all have to respect it. What is completely unacceptable is that some of the officials who are so roundly condemned in this report as unfit to serve are still drawing government paychecks. Paterson misled his own press staff, and the state, about his involvement in the Johnson affair from the start. He did not bother finding out early what had happened between Johnson and his former girlfriend, Sherr-una Booker. He left a plaintive message on Booker's phone, pleading with her to change her public statements and attempting to remind her that he was not trying to get her to drop any charges against Johnson. Kaye added that his administration had failed to cooperate 'fully,' in part by taking too long to produce requested evidence. At least Paterson had the grace to take himself out of the running for a full term as governor. Other officials resigned, including the one who supervises the State Police, which inserted itself into the Johnson-Booker case in a wildly inappropriate way. But two other officials are, inexplicably, still on the government payroll. Kaye's report said that the State Police major in charge of Paterson's security detail, Charles Day, called Booker on the night of Johnson's alleged assault to try to get her to forgo a criminal complaint and later gave what the report delicately calls 'inaccurate testimony' to investigators. A senior adviser to the governor, Clemmie L. Harris Jr., admitted that he tried to find a way to get Booker to drop her case. These people do not have any right to a government paycheck, even if Kaye thinks they should not be prosecuted. The entire affair, from the confusing start, to the troubling middle, to the damning conclusion is just more evidence of Paterson's haphazard way of governing. While Kaye spent four months coming to this less than satisfying ending to her investigation, Paterson spent four months failing to get a solid, balanced budget out of the state Legislature. If the governor wants to make it up, a bit, to New Yorkers for his bad judgment and misbehavior, he will finish that task soon. CONGRESSMAN RANGEL FACES HIS PEERS It is disheartening for the nation that Rep. Charles Rangel, once one of the most powerful members of Congress, must face 13 charges of violating House ethics rules. The citation of 'substantial reason' to believe the New York Democrat committed misdeeds was announced by an investigatory subcommittee, pointing toward a trial by the full Ethics Committee that could recommend acquittal, censure or expulsion after Rangel's 40 years in Congress. The grave proceeding ended a week of speculation about a compromise deal amid calls for Rangel to resign to avoid the public spectacle of judgment before his peers. The congressman, proud and combative in proclaiming his innocence, had every right to demand a full airing of the charges. Now taxpayers invested in an ethical Congress have the right to know the truth. The charges have accumulated across two years of investigation that earlier cost Rangel the prized gavel of the Ways and Means Committee. They include his failure to report at least $500,000 in assets on his House disclosure papers; his misusing congressional letterhead to solicit donations for his legacy school at City College of New York; his defending an off-shore tax loophole worth tens of millions to one of the school's more generous donors; his failure to pay taxes on rental income from his Dominican villa; and the acceptance of four rent-stabilized apartments in violation of House gift rules. Rangel might have pursued a wiser, more apologetic course than blanket denial. But the priority now is that the allegations be presented in clear detail and judged apart from the obvious political ramifications. A Republican member of the subcommittee put it best: 'Credibility is exactly what is at stake here -- the very credibility of the House of Representatives itself before the American people.' THE BELTWAY'S LETHAL RIDE There is a chilling warning for the nation's commuters in the scathing analysis of last year's collision of two Washington subway trains that killed nine people and left dozens injured. According to the findings of the National Transportation Safety Board, automatic train control circuits had been malfunctioning for years on the region's sprawling Metro system. The system's managers were found to be negligent. Metro executives are vowing to repair the faulty equipment and attitudes. But there's no real guarantee, because the transportation safety board has no enforcement powers. That means Congress must step in and give the federal government the much needed authority to create and enforce safety regulations for the nation's mushrooming public transit systems. Pending legislation would grant oversight and enforcement powers to the Federal Transit Administration and increase safety spending for public transit. In the meantime, transit administration officials have wisely announced a review of federal grants with new emphasis on the transportation board's recommendations in the Metro crash, including getting rid of faulty tracking equipment and dated cars. Faulty control systems in Washington's Metro triggered so many thousands of alarms each week that officials ignored most of them. In the deadly collision, a paused train on the track went undetected by the supposedly fail-safe control system, and a moving train plowed into it at high speed. Some of the same dangerous equipment and unsafe commuter cars found to be at fault in the Metro tragedy are in use in major systems across the nation. Commuters are right to wonder about their own rides and right to insist that Congress put a robust regulatory system in place. 