Three scandals have converged in the past week to preoccupy Congress and the press. Benghazi was the first to come, and it has surprised by its staying power. The abuse of power by the IRS may be, in the long run, the most damaging of these cases for the Obama presidency, but its outlines are only beginning to emerge. But the ugliest of the scandals has come from the revelation of the justice department's seizure of two months of phone calls by 100 AP reporters. This was done to investigate the leak of a thwarted terrorist plot which the government itself had already decided to disclose in public. Different as they are, the scandals all point to a single disorder that afflicts the Obama White House and the Holder justice department. The name of the disorder is paternalism, and its leading symptoms are suppression and secrecy.

You can hardly point out that the Emperor has no clothes if you're not even allowed to look in his direction. And that's precisely the point of the government's war on whistleblowers. The message couldn't be more clear or more authoritarian: Avert your eyes, citizens!

With bipartisan concern clear and public interest in the program growing, now is the time for the Justice Department to explain fully its legal support for the program, or risk more claims of the Obama administration's hypocrisy.

Rhetoric is no substitute for reality, and given the president's unfortunate extension of the Bush-Cheney assault on civil liberties, his administration deserves criticism.

This is one of the best reasons I've heard yet for why the Obama administration should release the legal memos written to justify its overseas targeted killings of terror suspects, regardless of whether any court ever orders it to.

Americans now possess (or more accurately are possessed by) a vast "intelligence" bureaucracy deeply in the shadows, whose activities are a mass of known unknowns and unknown unknowns to those of us on the outside. It is beyond enormous.

The federal government is classifying information at a rapidly increasing pace, and every time the CIA, FBI or National Security Agency stamps a docum...

Classification is important; state secrets do need to be guarded. But more important than classification is government transparency. Classification in a democracy must be used judiciously and sparingly, else democracy itself is imperiled.

In the years since the 9/11 attacks, the Complex has made itself, if nothing else, utterly secure, and paranoia has been its closest companion. A superstructure of "security" has been endlessly expanded based largely on the fear that terrorists will do you harm.

Despite campaigning to restore liberty in the face of Bush & Cheney's blind pursuit of a brutish (and ultimately foolish) vision of security, President Obama has not only continued their constitutional abuses but even pioneered new ones.

When the United States championed democracy, freedom, and opportunity, it made sense to celebrate the Fourth of July. But are we still promoting those values? If we are paragons of neither opportunity nor freedom, what exactly do we celebrate today?

Overclassification actually threatens national security by limiting the sharing of information among officials and agencies. More fundamentally, overclassification undermines the critical ingredient for a well-functioning democracy: an informed citizenry.

The Department of Justice has proposed federal regulations that would authorize the United States government to lie to the American people. This is not as crazy as it seems.

The White House has issued an executive order today aimed at improving the security of classified networks and preventing the release of documents to ...

Last week, almost five years after we filed our request under the Freedom of Information Act request, we managed to obtain two Bush administration legal memos about government surveillance.

NEW YORK — More openness in government. Lawmakers across the country, including the Republicans who took control in many states this year, say t...