Think Progress, the blog for the non-partisan Center On American Progress, has made a name for itself pretending to be a “progressive” news and analysis site despite reflexively defending the Democratic Party and being funded by an organization that refuses to disclose its donors (one hint it means “to soar” in Esperanto). But now the site has gone from being a party organ dishonestly posing as a group of principled activists into defending the most Nixonian practices of the Obama Administration.

Years behind the left and groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Sean Hannity is just now beginning to complain about the the government being too intrusive. Hannity pretended today not to know the government is already collecting our calls and emails, but he was in a snit to hear that Democrats have proposed new telecommunications rules that would require providers like AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and others to retain text messages for two years in case they are needed by law enforcement.

A scathing report released days ago by a Senate subcommittee concluded Department of Homeland Security fusion centers at the state and local level had not “produced useful intelligence to support federal counterterrorism efforts.” It also found “DHS-assigned detailees” have “forwarded ‘intelligence’ of uneven quality—oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections.”

The findings have garnered some necessary attention by showing, as Julian Sanchez wrote, that the United States’ “broken panopticon” is “expensive and useless.” The fusion centers were foisted upon Americans as a necessity to keep the country secure. The violations of privacy, however, have not benefited the safety of Americans.

Since September 11, 2001, discerning Americans have watched in dismay as their government has stripped away their most basic freedoms, and continues to mutate into something resembling a police state.

Wait til you meet Trapwire.

Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald gave a talk at the Socialism 2012 conference in Chicago where he described how central it was to activism and movements like the Occupy movement to challenge the surveillance state in America. Any attempts to meaningfully challenge state or corporate power, he declared, run up against the surveillance state because it is designed to impede, deter and chill action. Understanding how it operates and “how to challenge it and undermine it and subvert it really is an absolute prerequisite to any sort of meaningful activism.”

The release of “newly obtained documents” that clearly show the New York Police Department engaged in ethnic profiling and explicitly targeted Muslims seems to have become a weekly event. Each week, the Associated Press has some “secret files” that make it even more clear how illicit the acts of the NYPD were in the surveillance of communities. And each week Mayor Michael Bloomberg, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly and others come out and defend the spying as necessary.

It seems the Administration has declared today “Power Grab Monday.”

It appears the White House may have gotten itself caught in the kabuki it played with the press on the Russian spies now swapped for some spies in Russian custody. But the timing of the kabuki suggests the target of the spy sting may not have been the illegals, but two Russian officials working under official cover.

The Obama administration has approved covert military operations in a wide number of Middle Eastern countries, The New York Times reports, including in Somalia, Yemen and Iran (not to mention the long-running, kinda sorta covert war in Pakistan). As former National Security Council staffers Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett note, Obama’s move marks a particularly dramatic “intensification of America’s covert war against Iran” — a war that, because it is being run out of the office of General David Petraeus and CENTCOM, is “not subject to the same congressional oversight and reporting requirements as the Central Intelligence Agency.”

Eric Schmidt implies that all your searches are available to the Feds.