The Bush administration did a stunning about-face on Wednesday. After insisting for more than a year that its warrantless wiretapping program was perfectly proper, the administration agreed to put the program under the supervision of a special court.

The move, as welcome as it was belated, was a nod to legal and political reality: A federal judge in Detroit had declared the program unconstitutional, and it faced a hostile reception in the new Democratic Congress.

The turnaround means that government eavesdropping will at least have judicial oversight, although the details remain murky. But it doesn't mean the government can't still gather personal information about Americans without a court order.

How? Through something called a National Security Letter. Unlike the warrantless wiretapping program, these letters don't violate any laws, though perhaps they should.

National Security Letters have their origin in the 1970s as exceptions to laws that bar companies from divulging their customers' data. After 9/11 and the passage of the USA Patriot Act, their use greatly expanded.

These letters � which government agencies can use to demand or request information about people's phone, credit and banking records � have a number of troubling features. Chief among them are that they can be issued without judicial review and that their recipients are subject to a gag order.

It's bad enough that the FBI has issued thousands of these letters; now, according to a New York Times report confirmed by Vice President Cheney, the Defense Department and CIA are also getting into the act.

The Bush administration has trampled so many civil liberties in the name of the war on terror that it's tempting to shrug off yet another example. Yet the Pentagon's expanding role in domestic intelligence is alarming. This country has tried to keep the military out of law enforcement since the Posse Comitatus Act in 1878, with exceptions for such things as drug interdiction and border enforcement.

Perhaps even more important, however, is what this latest disclosure says about how the war on terror is going. If the United States is going to prevent terror attacks, it needs its departments and agencies to work together better than they did before 9/11.

The fact that the CIA and the Pentagon are conducting their own domestic investigations does not bode well for this cause. It suggests that turf wars and empire building remain more important than collaboration.

For the military, this behavior fits all too well into the campaign of mission creep advanced by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. For him it wasn't enough to have a military that fights the nation's wars. He wanted one that did diplomacy, intelligence gathering and, apparently, domestic law enforcement. For the CIA, it suggests that the longtime divide between it and FBI has not been fully bridged.

If the letters continue to be sanctioned by law, the program should at least be consolidated into the Justice Department. If not, the administration may have found a way to simultaneously go too far in undermining individual liberties while not going far enough to fight the war on terror.