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The National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets.

The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley. Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to a top-secret document: “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”

PRISM was launched from the ashes of President George W. Bush’s secret program of warrantless domestic surveillance in 2007, after news media disclosures, lawsuits and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court forced the president to look for new authority. Congress obliged with the Protect America Act in 2007 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which immunized private companies that cooperated voluntarily with U.S. intelligence collection. PRISM recruited its first partner, Microsoft, and began six years of rapidly growing data collection beneath the surface of a roiling national debate on surveillance and privacy.

Late last year, when critics in Congress sought changes in the FISA Amendments Act, the only lawmakers who knew about PRISM were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues. The court-approved program is focused on foreign communications traffic, which often flows through U.S. servers even when sent from one overseas location to another.

The Obama Administration acknowledged a top-secret National Security Agency program that collects information on Internet users. The government insisted the program is aimed only at people outside of the United States and is tremendously valuable in stopping terrorism.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said in a statement that the "highest priority" of the intelligence community is to "work within the constraints of the law" to collect, analyze and understand information related to potential threats. "The unauthorized disclosure of a top secret U.S. court document threatens potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to the many threats facing our nation," Clapper said. Separately, an administration official said: "Information collected under this program is among the most important and valuable intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats."

The disclosure of a broad government effort to collect phone records of millions of U.S. consumers has rekindled a debate about President Barack Obama's commitment to civil liberties, with some lawmakers and advocacy groups saying he has broken a campaign pledge to combat terrorism in ways that protect basic freedoms.

Obama's record on civil liberties was already drawing renewed scrutiny over reports that his administration has investigated journalists as part of criminal leak cases, his increased use of drones and other matters. As a candidate in 2008, the-Sen Obama took aim at then-President George W. Bush's assertion of certain executive powers in fighting terrorism. Once in the White House, he did away with some of the tools used by Bush's administration while keeping others intact. In certain respects, the counterterrorism tactics of the two Presidents seem indistinguishable, some civil-liberties advocates say.

[Commentary] The Guardian newspaper reported on a secret court order showing that a subsidiary of Verizon was required to turn over all of its customers' records for a three-month period. Members of Congress soon confirmed this was part of a larger collection program dating back seven years. The most tangible problem is the invasion of Americans' privacy.

The so-called metadata collected by the NSA includes information about our calls, such as the numbers we call, the numbers of those who call us, when the calls are made, and for how long. This information may seem relatively trivial at first blush. Yet, pieced together, these details can paint a detailed and sensitive picture of our private lives and our associations. Calls to a therapist's office, Alcoholics Anonymous, repeated late-night calls to a friend's wife—the existence of these calls can reveal as much in some instances as the calls' actual content. Another concern is legality. The program is taking place under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allows the government to obtain records and other "tangible things" only if they are relevant to an authorized foreign-intelligence or international-terrorism investigation. It is simply not possible that all of the phone records of every American are relevant to a specific authorized investigation. Such an interpretation of "relevance" (or of "investigation") would render Section 215's limitation utterly meaningless. There may be a constitutional concern, as well. Whether the program's usefulness would justify the incursion into Americans' privacy is a question of balancing competing policy priorities—a core question of public policy that is for the American people, not a handful of intelligence officials, to debate and decide. Why were we not given that opportunity?

A public debate on the government's surveillance authorities is long overdue. The silver lining to this week's revelations is that we may finally begin to have it.

[Goitein is co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice in New York]