Jennifer Stisa Granick and Christopher Jon Sprigman, The Criminal N.S.A.:

The twin revelations that telecom carriers have been secretly giving the National Security Agency information about Americans’ phone calls, and that the N.S.A. has been capturing e-mail and other private communications from Internet companies as part of a secret program called Prism, have not enraged most Americans. Lulled, perhaps, by the Obama administration’s claims that these “modest encroachments on privacy” were approved by Congress and by federal judges, public opinion quickly migrated from shock to “meh.”

It didn’t help that Congressional watchdogs… have accepted the White House’s claims of legality…  This view is wrong… The two programs violate both the letter and the spirit of federal law. No statute explicitly authorizes mass surveillance. Through a series of legal contortions, the Obama administration has argued that Congress, since 9/11, intended to implicitly authorize mass surveillance. But this strategy mostly consists of wordplay, fear-mongering and a highly selective reading of the law…

Cut to Granick and Sprigman’s concluding paragraph:

We may never know all the details of the mass surveillance programs, but we know this: The administration has justified them through abuse of language, intentional evasion of statutory protections, secret, unreviewable investigative procedures and constitutional arguments that make a mockery of the government’s professed concern with protecting Americans’ privacy. It’s time to call the N.S.A.’s mass surveillance programs what they are: criminal.

Read their op-ed for the specifics of their argument.

Charlie Pierce on the role of journalists in a democratic society:

I like to believe that the larger question raised by the whole Snowden episode is to allow the American people to decide precisely how secret their government should be. That’s why I bristled when [Meet the Press host David Gregory] implied that Glenn Greenwald might not be a “journalist.” I think he is, but opinions can vary and he might not be. But what he is practicing certainly is journalism. I’ve always believed that, in this free society, one of the primary jobs of the craft is to deny a self-governing people the alibi of “We didn’t know.” The job is not to leave them that excuse, anyway. You could have known. You should have known. If we do our jobs correctly, it’s your fault if you didn’t know, not the government’s. I believe that is what is happening in this case. The American people have to decide precisely how secret their government should be. Edward Snowden — and Glenn Greenwald — are doing nothing if they are not providing a self-governing people with the information needed to make that determination. They are eliminating “We didn’t know” as an alibi, and that’s what journalism is supposed to do.