The Senate Intelligence Committee, which has shirked its oversight responsibilities by not investigating the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping and failing to complete its work on investigating how the White House used intelligence leading up to the war in Iraq, has a chance to redeem itself.

Now that it has been revealed that the NSA wasn’t just listening in on supposed terrorists’ phone calls without warrants but was in fact collecting billions of phone records of everyday domestic phone calls without court approval, the committee must reassert its authority.

It can begin by asking Gen. Michael Hayden, the president’s choice to head the Central Intelligence Agency and former head of the NSA who will be before the committee for confirmation hearings next week, about this data-collection effort. The first question is what is gained by looking for patterns among billions of phone records. Haven’t terrorists already learned that their communications are likely to be monitored, and so are phone logs really useful?

Second, what plots have been disrupted by the phone record collection? Questions such as these obviously would be answered during a classified meeting.

Finally, is this program constitutional? If not, and especially if the information gathered so far hasn’t been especially useful, the NSA can slow down and seek court approval if it wants to continue such surveillance.

Last year, when it was revealed that the NSA was listening in on international phone calls without court approval, President Bush assured the country that the “terrorist surveillance program” involved only suspected al-Qaida operatives.

This week, USA Today reported the National Security Agency has collected records from tens of millions of Americans, far too many to all be suspected terrorists. The records show what phone numbers have been called from other phone numbers and includes purely domestic calls. Although the records don’t include names and addresses it would be easy to cross-reference this information.

Three major phone companies, AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, provided the information when the government asked for it. AT&T even provided the NSA with a direct hookup into a company database that has been recording the telephone numbers and duration of every call made since 2001, the Los Angeles Times reported in December. A fourth company, Qwest, refused because it believed the request violated privacy laws.

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s job is to ensure that useful, non-distorted intelligence is being gathered within the bounds of the law. A coalition of committee members, including Sen. Olympia Snowe, could get this work under way.