And the beat goes on.

President Obama has not just embraced retroactive immunity and the position that every legal inquiry into warrantless wiretapping should be smothered, by repeated and indiscriminate application of his very own enhanced reincarnation of the state secrets privilege. He has also embraced warrantless wiretapping itself. Pretty wholeheartedly. And not just the borderline questionable practices, but down to the abuses that clearly cross the line.

The National Security Agency is facing renewed scrutiny over the extent of its domestic surveillance program, with critics in Congress saying its recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged, current and former officials said.

The agency’s monitoring of domestic e-mail messages, in particular, has posed longstanding legal and logistical difficulties, the officials said.

Since April, when it was disclosed that the intercepts of some private communications of Americans went beyond legal limits in late 2008 and early 2009, several Congressional committees have been investigating. Those inquiries have led to concerns in Congress about the agency’s ability to collect and read domestic e-mail messages of Americans on a widespread basis, officials said. Supporting that conclusion is the account of a former N.S.A. analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation.

Can’t you just feel all that change crackling in the air?