In this case, we have the FBI using national security letters, which require no judicial review, as a giant Hoover to spy on tens of thousands of Americans illegally.

What’s more, when they were informed that this was illegal, they engaged in an orgy of illegal ass-covering:

This created a backlog of records that the F.B.I. had obtained without going through proper procedures. In response, the letter said, the F.B.I. devised a plan: rather than issuing national security letters retroactively for each individual investigation, it would issue the blanket letters to cover all the records obtained from a particular phone company.

Lets be clear. This is not the exception, this is the rule. It is the basic place that any part of the state security apparatus is coming from, and it has been since well before the founding of the Republic.

These sorts of situational ethics are simply part of the mindset.