The Criminal N.S.A.

From law professors Jennifer Stisa Granick and Christopher Jon Sprigman, in today’s New York Times:

“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.”

UPDATE: Here’s a good article in the Atlantic riffing off of the Granick & Sprigman piece, and filling in some background beyond what they could do within their word count limit.