Within hours of the disclosure that federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.

Those reassurances have never been persuasive - whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency's phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism - especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability.

The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.

An FBI agent almost shot a Detroit cop on Wednesday at a gas station while filling up. It wasn't the agent or the cop's fault. It was the cop's bosses, who came up with the lame brain idea to simulate a purse snatching and then invite a TV crew to film your reaction Detroit. The immediate supervisor of these cops had no idea this was happening until they called him.

"The event takes place. The officer takes the purse, runs around the gas station. As he's running, an off-duty FBI agent is pumping gas. He witnesses the whole thing. He gives chase. He pulls his weapon, and as he turns the corner around the gas station, he's stopped by another officer, who identifies herself as a police officer and don't shoot, don't shoot, this is a scenario," said Inspector Shawn Gargalino with the Detroit Police Department.

That is the same description of events we got from four other ranking law enforcement officials, including Lieutenant Chuck Flannagan, a 28-year veteran of DPD.

"It's a tragedy waiting to happen. In fact, I understand an FBI agent did pull a weapon because he didn't believe it was a staged, and some officers had to run forward to prevent him from possibly shooting an officer. We have enough robberies at gas stations that most people aren't going to assume it's a mock robbery," he said.

Private companies are getting rich probing your personal information for the government. Call it Digital Blackwater

Amid the torrent of stories about the shocking new revelations about the National Security Agency, few have bothered to ask a central question. Who's actually doing the work of analyzing all the data, metadata and personal information pouring into the agency from Verizon and nine key Internet service providers for its ever-expanding surveillance of American citizens?

Well, on Sunday we got part of the answer: Booz Allen Hamilton. In a stunning development in the NSA saga, Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald revealed that the source for his blockbuster stories on the NSA is Edward Snowden, "a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton." Snowden, it turns out, has been working at NSA for the last four years as a contract employee, including stints for Booz and the computer-services firm Dell.

The revelation is not that surprising. With about 70 percent of our national intelligence budgets being spent on the private sector - a discovery I made in 2007 and first reported in Salon - contractors have become essential to the spying and surveillance operations of the NSA.

From Narus, the Israeli-born Boeing subsidiary that makes NSA's high-speed interception software, to CSC, the "systems integrator" that runs NSA's internal IT system, defense and intelligence, contractors are making millions of dollars selling technology and services that help the world's largest surveillance system spy on you. If the 70 percent figure is applied to the NSA's estimated budget of $8 billion a year (the largest in the intelligence community), NSA contracting could reach as high as $6 billion every year.

But it's probably much more than that.

Insisting that attempts at "100 percent security" will always come with inconveniences, President Barack Obama said "we're going to have to make some choices as a society." NBC's Pete Williams reports.

The National Security Agency has at times mistakenly intercepted the private email messages and phone calls of Americans who had no link to terrorism, requiring Justice Department officials to report the errors to a secret national security court and destroy the data, according to two former U.S. intelligence officials.

At least some of the phone calls and emails were pulled from among the hundreds of millions stored by telecommunications companies as part of an NSA surveillance program. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, Thursday night publicly acknowledged what he called "a sensitive intelligence collection program" after its existence was disclosed by the Guardian newspaper.

Ret. Adm. Dennis Blair, who served as President Obama's DNI in 2009 and 2010, told NBC News that, in one instance in 2009, analysts entered a phone number into agency computers and "put one digit wrong," and mined a large volume of information about Americans with no connection to terror. The matter was reported to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose judges required that all the data be destroyed, he said.

Another former senior official, who asked not to be identified, confirmed Blair's recollection and said the incident created serious problems for the Justice Department, which represents the NSA before the federal judges on the secret court.

The military trial of Bradley Manning is a judicial lynching. The government has effectively muzzled the defense team. The Army private first class is not permitted to argue that he had a moral and legal obligation under international law to make public the war crimes he uncovered. The documents that detail the crimes, torture and killing Manning revealed, because they are classified, have been barred from discussion in court, effectively removing the fundamental issue of war crimes from the trial. Manning is forbidden by the court to challenge the government's unverified assertion that he harmed national security. Lead defense attorney David E. Coombs said during pretrial proceedings that the judge's refusal to permit information on the lack of actual damage from the leaks would "eliminate a viable defense, and cut defense off at the knees." And this is what has happened.

Manning is also barred from presenting to the court his motives for giving the website WikiLeaks hundreds of thousands of classified diplomatic cables, war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq, and videos. The issues of his motives and potentially harming national security can be raised only at the time of sentencing, but by then it will be too late.

The latest objective estimate for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is between $3.7 trillion and $4.4 trillion, according to the research project "Costs of War" by Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies. Prominent American economist Joseph E. Stiglitz put the total cost to the United States of the Iraq war at $3 trillion dollars in 2008. In September 2010 he said that our estimate "was if anything too low." The United States is to spend more than $6 billion in Iraq in 2012 even though its forces are to withdraw from the country by the end of this year.

The House voted Thursday to overturn all of President Obama's non-deportation policies, in a vote freighted with meaning as Congress warily eyes a broader immigration debate later over the next few months.

It was one of several rebukes the House issued to Mr. Obama's immigration policies as the chamber debates a homeland security funding bill. The House also voted to preserve a program that lets local police help enforce immigration laws, rejecting the president's effort to defund it.

The votes signal that the House will continue to be a major hurdle for Mr. Obama, who wants to see Congress pass a bill legalizing the 11 million illegal immigrants now in the country. The deportation policy vote shows House lawmakers - and Republicans in particular - are still focused on enforcement.

The 224-201 vote broke chiefly along party lines and would undo what Republicans refer to as Mr. Obama's administrative "amnesty" for illegal immigrants.

Two Internal Revenue Service agents working in the agency's Cincinnati office say higher-ups in Washington directed the targeting of conservative political groups when they applied for tax-exempt status, a contention that directly contradicts claims made by the agency since the scandal erupted last month.

The Cincinnati agents didn't provide proof that senior IRS officials in Washington ordered the targeting. But one of the agents said her work processing the applications was closely supervised by a Washington lawyer in the IRS division that handles applications for tax-exempt status, according to a transcript of her interview with congressional investigators.

Her interview suggests a long trail of emails that could support her claim.

Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) had some harsh words Thursday for the Obama administration collecting phone records of millions of Americans.

Speaking with Yahoo! News, Paul said, "I think it would be remedial education for those who are doing this. They need to go back and read the Constitution, read the Fourth Amendment, and understand that our records are private."

OLIVIER KNOX, YAHOO! NEWS CHIEF WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT: So overnight, sir, we learned that the National Security Agency, with the blessing of a court order, has been collecting the Verizon phone records of millions of Americans. What's your reaction to that?

SENATOR RAND PAUL (R-KENTUCKY): I'm appalled. I'm absolutely opposed to the government sifting and sorting through millions of innocent people's records. I'm not opposed to them going to a judge and getting an order for an individual who you have probable cause to believe that they've been involved with a crime. So one thing it's a great invasion of our privacy, but it's also I don't think good police work. Better police work would be tracking down individuals who have come here from other countries, that are traveling in and out, that are associating with terrorists and going and looking at an individual's records with a judge's warrant. But I think when you look at millions of people's records, you get distracted.

It's sort of like the TSA at the airport. Because we treat everyone as a potential terrorist, we're wasting time with twelve-year-old kids and seventy five-year-old grandmothers. They're trying to get away from that, but it's been twelve years and they're still doing it. So it's the same thing here. We're sifting through too many people's records. It's a violation of the Bill of Rights. We need to have a better and a more thorough understanding of the Fourth Amendment.

No healthy democracy can endure when the most consequential acts of those in power remain secret and unaccountable

We followed Wednesday's story about the NSA's bulk telephone record-gathering with one yesterday about the agency's direct access to the servers of the world's largest internet companies. I don't have time at the moment to address all of the fallout because - to borrow someone else's phrase - I'm Looking Forward to future revelations that are coming (and coming shortly), not Looking Backward to ones that have already come.

But I do want to make two points. One is about whistleblowers, and the other is about threats of investigations emanating from Washington:

1) Ever since the Nixon administration broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychoanalyst's office, the tactic of the US government has been to attack and demonize whistleblowers as a means of distracting attention from their own exposed wrongdoing and destroying the credibility of the messenger so that everyone tunes out the message. That attempt will undoubtedly be made here.

I'll say more about all that shortly, but for now: as these whistleblowing acts becoming increasingly demonized ("reprehensible", declared Director of National Intelligence James Clapper yesterday), please just spend a moment considering the options available to someone with access to numerous Top Secret documents.