Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Mark Udall (D-Colorado) are blasting the NSA's admission that – because of its own internal bungling – it carried out thousands of inquiries on phone numbers without any of the court-ordered screening designed to protect Americans from illegal government surveillance.

It took two of the most outspoken NSA critics nearly a week to respond to Intelligence Director James Clapper's concession. But regardless, it was a welcome response from the seemingly endless Washington doublespeak supporting the NSA at all costs, even in the face of egregious constitutional breaches.

Here's what Wyden and Udall had to say:

Documents declassified last week clearly show that court orders authorizing the NSA’s bulk collection of phone records were consistently violated by the NSA. These documents also show that the government repeatedly made serious misrepresentations to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court when seeking authorization to conduct this bulk collection. The intelligence community’s defense was that these violations were occurring because no one had a full grasp of how the bulk collection program actually worked. If the assertion that ineptitude and not malice was the cause of these ongoing violations is taken at face value, it is perfectly reasonable for Congress and the American people to question whether a program that no one fully understood was an effective defense of American security at all. The fact that this program was allowed to operate this way raises serious concerns about the potential for blind spots in the NSA’s surveillance programs. It also supports our position that bulk collection ought to be ended.

Wyden's and Udall's comments Monday follow the government declassifying hundreds of pages of formerly top secret documents from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The documents show that, "since the earliest days" of the government's bulk phone-calling metadata collection program in 2006, it has abused the privacy rights of Americans at least through 2009.

Clapper's response: The NSA didn't do it on purpose.

"The compliance incidents discussed in these documents stemmed in large part from the complexity of the technology employed in connection with the bulk telephony metadata collection program, interaction of that technology with other NSA systems, and a lack of a shared understanding among various NSA components about how certain aspects of the complex architecture supporting the program functioned," Clapper said in a blog post.

That said, the NSA's telephone metadata program – where it collects the phone numbers of both parties involved in all calls, the international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) number for mobile callers, calling card numbers used in the call, and the time and duration of the calls – continues unabated. Proposals to end the program, unveiled by The Guardian in June, have been summarily defeated by lawmakers.