If it wasn't enough that this criminal administration has had the Benghazi affair and the IRS attacks blow up in it's face this last week, now the Justice Department admits to seizing phone records from the AP.  

The most transparent administration in history offers no reason why they engaged in this egregious invasion of the privacy and first amendment rights of the press.  Arrogance, squared.

This brings to mind that story from Wired back in March of last year revealing the construction of the biggest domestic electronic spy center on the planet.  From the article:

  "Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

The retired whistleblower stated:

Sitting in a restaurant not far from NSA headquarters, the place where he spent nearly 40 years of his life, Binney held his thumb and forefinger close together. “We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state,” he says.

Hmmm.  I wonder why they might have put that provision in the amnesty bill that requires the establishment of a biometric database on all adult Americans?

Or the law requiring black box style tracking devices in all new cars by 2015?

Indeed. Now that the technology is in place, the only thing holding back the authorities is their belief and adherence to the constitution and/or a moral sense of what is right versus what is wrong.

With this administration, both of those qualities are not just in short supply, they are wholly absent, as we can see from today's headlines.