The intel­li­gence community’s gild­ed rep­u­ta­tion, already tar­nished by months of unau­tho­rized dis­clo­sures, was dragged into the realm of the creepy last Fri­day when an NSA offi­cial told a reporter about an agency employ­ee who had tapped secret gov­ern­ment data to spy on his ex-wife.

And he wasn’t the only one.  Turns out that these occur­rences are fre­quent enough to have acquired the code­name LOVEINT, stalk­ing evi­dent­ly being an expres­sion of love.

The agency was quick to assure us that “very rare instances of will­ful vio­la­tions of NSA’s author­i­ties have been found.”  The state­ment is coy, the words care­ful­ly cho­sen.  “Will­ful vio­la­tions” of agency pol­i­cy, it says, very rarely “have been found.”  The state­ment does not say that they rarely occur.  Oper­a­tives who are smart enough to mine the government’s rich trove of infor­ma­tion about US cit­i­zens for their own pur­pos­es are gen­er­al­ly smart enough to evade detec­tion.  As with most crim­i­nals, the incom­pe­tent are most like­ly to get caught.  Most LOVEINT vio­la­tions of which the agency is aware, in fact, were self-report­ed.

The state­ment marks the lat­est retreat by the gov­ern­ment in its shift­ing defense of intel­li­gence prac­tices. They began by telling us that no one was mon­i­tor­ing our phone records, a whop­per for which the Direc­tor of Nation­al Intel­li­gence was forced to apol­o­gize once the first of the Snow­den doc­u­ments was made pub­lic. Then we were told that the con­tent of our calls was safe, which it lat­er emerged was­n’t entire­ly true.  Then the Pres­i­dent pro­nounced him­self “com­fort­able” with all the snoop­ing and declared his inten­tion to make us com­fort­able too.

We should relax, he told us, because our data is “not abused” since “abus­es would be against the law and would be against the orders of the FISC (For­eign Intel­li­gence Sur­veil­lance Court).”  That is equiv­a­lent to say­ing that no one dri­ves 70 miles per hour because the speed lim­it is 65, and it unrav­eled almost before the words were out of the President’s mouth.  Soon we learned that the NSA had vio­lat­ed FISC rul­ings 3,000 times over the course of just one year at its main facil­i­ty alone.

But once again we were promised that such vio­la­tions were just hon­est mis­takes and that no one had ever inten­tion­al­ly done any­thing wrong.  “There have been no find­ings of any inten­tion­al or bad faith vio­la­tions,” Direc­tor of Nation­al Intel­li­gence James Clap­per recent­ly wrote in a let­ter to Sen­a­tor Ron Wyden (D‑OR).   Which was fol­lowed by last Friday’s con­ces­sion that there have indeed been inten­tion­al and bad faith vio­la­tions, accom­pa­nied by the assur­ance that vio­la­tors some­times get caught.

Com­fort­able yet?

At least the lovelorn bureau­crats who con­fessed to wrong­do­ing were pun­ished.  Some were report­ed­ly fired, oth­ers sub­ject­ed to unspec­i­fied “admin­is­tra­tive action” (rela­tion­ship coun­sel­ing, per­haps, or manda­to­ry enroll­ment in match.com).

Hold­ing gov­ern­ment work­ers account­able for their actions is a rare event.  Last week, the gov­ern­ment exon­er­at­ed four State Depart­ment offi­cials who had been placed on admin­is­tra­tive leave while the agency deter­mined whether they bore any blame for last September’s ter­ror­ist assault on a US diplo­mat­ic facil­i­ty in Beng­hazi.  The depart­ment con­clud­ed that the four had failed to pro­vide “proac­tive lead­er­ship and man­age­ment author­i­ty,” but com­mit­ted no “breach of duty.”

So it is now offi­cial: no gov­ern­ment employ­ee will be held account­able for a secu­ri­ty fail­ure that result­ed in the death of a US ambas­sador and three oth­er Amer­i­cans.  The accused offi­cials are back at the office — tanned, rest­ed and ready after what amount­ed to 8 months of paid vaca­tion — no doubt with the exhor­ta­tion to get out there and be “proac­tive.”

And speak­ing of what the Pres­i­dent likes to call “pho­ny scan­dals,” what­ev­er became of those low-lev­el employ­ees at the IRS’s Cincin­nati office who slow-walked appli­ca­tions from Tea Par­ty groups for 501(c)(4) sta­tus?  The Pres­i­dent long ago declared their con­duct “inex­cus­able,” but I’ve found no indi­ca­tion that any­one from the Cincin­nati office, which the Admin­is­tra­tion insists is sole­ly account­able for the agency’s mis­con­duct, is being dis­ci­plined.  Indeed, Cindy Thomas, who direct­ed the IRS’s Exempt Orga­ni­za­tions office in Cincin­nati, is report­ed­ly receiv­ing a pro­mo­tion.

I’ve writ­ten else­where that the pros­e­cu­tors in the case of the late Sen­a­tor Ted Stevens, who were found to have engaged in “sys­tem­at­ic con­ceal­ment of sig­nif­i­cant excul­pa­to­ry evi­dence,” recent­ly won their appeal and will not face any con­se­quences for the botched pros­e­cu­tion.  And then there is the less dra­mat­ic but far more per­va­sive prac­tice of gov­ern­ment waste, in which fed­er­al bean coun­ters despair of mak­ing accu­rate guess­es of just how much the gov­ern­ment frit­ters away each year in “improp­er pay­ments.”

Gov­ern­ment is unac­count­able in part because gov­ern­ment work­ers are unac­count­able.  That is by design.  Pro­gres­sives of the late nine­teenth and ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­turies argued that pow­er should be wield­ed by pub­lic ser­vants who can­not be dis­ci­plined or removed except in extra­or­di­nary cir­cum­stances.  The idea was to cre­ate a pow­er­ful new caste, one shield­ed from the messi­ness of pol­i­tics.  The civ­il ser­vant would be impar­tial and apo­lit­i­cal, com­mit­ted to the faith­ful admin­is­tra­tion of the law, pro­tect­ed from both threats and induce­ments to engage in mis­con­duct.  Unsul­lied by pol­i­tics and self-inter­est and unac­count­able to vot­ers, they would sin­gle-mind­ed­ly pur­sue the pub­lic interest.

This the­o­ry of the bureau­crat as Pla­ton­ic guardian was trans­formed into prac­tice over the ear­ly decades of the last cen­tu­ry. “Pri­or to 1900 there was much debate about civ­il ser­vice,”  wrote aca­d­e­mics P. S. Tol­bert & L. G. Zuck­er.  “By the 1920’s there was lit­tle con­flict, and by the 1930’s it was accept­ed as given.”

Prac­ti­cal real­i­ty does not con­form to the­o­ry. A 50-year-old gov­ern­ment work­er who joined the civ­il ser­vice after col­lege has worked under 5 dif­fer­ent Pres­i­dents, a dozen or so Cab­i­net sec­re­taries, and an ever-chang­ing cast of polit­i­cal appointees.   They all come and go, but she remains, her posi­tion secure, her con­sid­er­able pow­er large­ly unaf­fect­ed by the elec­torate’s shift­ing alle­giances.  She has mas­tered the rules of the game.  If she is lazy, she hasn’t advanced far up the food chain, but her job and retire­ment are nonethe­less safe.  If she is ambi­tious, she earns a nice income and holds enor­mous pow­er.  Per­haps she writes rules that gov­ern the affairs of pri­vate busi­ness­es and cit­i­zens or deter­mine how gov­ern­ment benef­i­cences are to be dis­trib­uted, or over­sees a grant-writ­ing process that dis­trib­utes pub­lic mon­ey to pri­vate actors, or man­ages con­tracts with pri­vate ven­dors.  And maybe those weighty deci­sions reflect her per­son­al pref­er­ences.  Maybe she some­times cuts a cor­ner or two here or there.  Who would know?  And what would be the consequences?

Gov­ern­ment is rife with moral haz­ard. Its pow­ers are vast and dif­fused among mil­lions of employ­ees and con­trac­tors. An esti­mat­ed 3.6 mil­lion peo­ple, includ­ing 600,000 con­trac­tors, have access to clas­si­fied mate­ri­als; 1.4 mil­lion peo­ple, includ­ing 500,000 con­trac­tors have top secret clear­ances.  With that infor­ma­tion comes pow­er, and with that pow­er, temp­ta­tion. They are humans, after all, and not angels. They suc­cumb to temp­ta­tion, more often than we might think or that agency over­lords would have us believe.  Abus­es occur and go unde­tect­ed.  Much of what is detect­ed goes unpun­ished.  Gov­ern­ment has acquired so much pow­er and accu­mu­lat­ed so much infor­ma­tion and giv­en so many peo­ple access to it as to ren­der gen­uine account­abil­i­ty and con­trol impossible.

All of which argues for hew­ing to con­sti­tu­tion­al stan­dards that lim­it government’s pow­er, par­tic­u­lar­ly its pow­er to col­lect infor­ma­tion about its citizens.