"Snowden’s leak is thus doubly damaging. The scandal isn’t just that the government is spying on us. It’s also that it’s giving guys like Snowden keys to the spying program. It suggests the worst combination of overreach and amateurishness, of power leveraged by incompetence. The Keystone Cops are listening to us all."

"Anyone who did not suspect that the government would continue to use as much technology as it could to gather as much private information as it could—a rock-solid constant since the time of Hoover’s F.B.I., at least—has not been paying attention."

"Snowden's whistleblowing gives us the possibility to roll back a key part of what has amounted to an "executive coup" against the US constitution. Since 9/11, there has been, at first secretly but increasingly openly, a revocation of the bill of rights for which this country fought over 200 years ago. In particular, the fourth and fifth amendments of the US constitution, which safeguard citizens from unwarranted intrusion by the government into their private lives, have been virtually suspended."

The editorial advises this is old news and a necessary practice. "Amid many real abuses of power, the political temptation will be to tie data-mining into a narrative about a government out of control. Such opportunism can only weaken our counterterror defenses and endanger the country."

"A former senior White House official, and a very bright man, said this week he didn't believe it was mischief but incompetence. But why did all the incompetent workers misunderstand their jobs and their mission in exactly the same way? Wouldn't general incompetence suggest both liberal and conservative groups would be abused more or less equally, or in proportion to the number of their applications?"

Four agencies close for business today.

Money and power speak loudly, which explains why Karl Rove and SEIU have not trouble getting tax exemptions (and donor-hiding) privileges, while upstart groups run afoul of the IRS.

Obama chops off the head of Steven Miller, acting commissioner of the IRS.

In a sweeping and unusual move, the Justice Department secretly obtained two months’ worth of telephone records of journalists working for the Associated Press as part of a year-long investigation into the disclosure of classified information about a failed al-Qaeda plot last year.

In American history, the Department of Interior has been a school for scandal.