The approach of this administration is that a crime is only a crime if (1) there's evidence for it, (2) the executive has seen the evidence, (3) the executive remembers having seen the evidence, and (4) there's evidence of the executive having seen the evidence. Once this has been irreconvocably established, there's of course the executive's pardon or commutation.

Of course, for the rest of us evidence of there even having been a crime is not necessary for detention. Goodbye habeas corpus.

To get at least a sense of the extend to which the current administration disregards civil liberties, read this letter in the The Washington Post from a man who ran an internet business, received a (likely improper) request for information from the government, and still can't talk about it.

Just the other day, I watched the Frontline report on the NSL letters, which had similar types of testimony... private citizens suggesting they'd received and been outraged by an unjust NSL order with a gag order, but which they were forbidden from discussing.

Have there been no prosecutions for violation of an NSL? I know it's a tall order to defy an unjust law - but you'd think in a country with the self-image of the United States, that more of those 140,000 recipients would have the courage to risk retaliation in order to expose the putative injustice behind these orders.

Maybe his denunciation of the letters is spot-on. But one can't tell, because by his own admission he's complicit in the secrecy.