Revelations add fuel to suspicions about administration

The good news is, you're not paranoid.

That's how the fake news program the Daily Show put it Monday.

The bad news is, the government IS keeping track of your telephone and Internet activities under the guise of national security.

The National Security Agency, whose existence wasn't even acknowledged all that many years ago, is so committed to the effort that it's building a giant data center in Utah capable as holding as much as 5 zetabytes of data.

That's the equivalent memory of 62 billion iPhone 5 smartphones stacked together, or about five million storage systems running about 1.25 billion, 4-terabyte hard drives.

In a way, we hope it's actually for mining Internet data, and not for keeping track of the national debt!

The effort, dubbed Prism, is designed to flag suspicious activity that might indicate terrorist activity.

Authorities justify such efforts by saying they hope to prevent another 9/11 attack. Should one occur, we can be sure there would be a call for just the type of activities we find the NSA has been undertaking.

Besides, goes the line of thinking, if we're doing nothing wrong, we don't have anything to fear.

But other recent revelations, such as the extra attention the IRS paid to tax-exempt applications from Tea Party groups, cast a bad light on a wide range of intelligence activities by the government, and raise question about political considerations.

Add to that the widespread snooping on reporters at the Associated Press, Fox News and others, and the administration is leaving itself open to justifiable criticism.

Yes, the government does have the responsibility to do what it can to keep us safe from terrorists, but not at the expense of stifling free speech and the ability of responsible media to expose corruption.