Let me make it clear that I appreciate Senator Ron Wyden’s willingness to raise the issues surrounding the US surveillance state, albeit quite obliquely until Edward Snowden risked his life to put the details on the table.

In a fascinating interview with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, Wyden contorts logic in defense of compliance with the classification rules that determine what can and can not be discussed, and pats himself on the back for getting certain things declassified, including statements about an important FISA court ruling (but not the ruling itself). He then goes on to say that while the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has now admitted that the national security apparatus has violated FISA court orders on bulk phone record collection, “I’ll tell your viewers that those violations are significantly more troubling than the government has stated.”

So Senator Wyden continues to have it both ways — serving as both a messenger of the wanton and illegal abuses by the national security apparatus, and a protector of that system and its secret courts. He lays out his philosophy of protecting the secrecy of our security operations, but not the secrecy of the legal underpinnings of those operations. But then he complies with the classification scheme which forces his near-silence, only to tease us with the claim that the government has been violating not just the law, but the orders of a secret court whose legal opinions are off-limits to the American public funding them, and whose Constitutional rights are on the line.

All of this despite the fact that he is almost certainly shielded from any charges against him through the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause. This provision in Article I of the Constitution gives cover to members of Congress when debating the issues as part of their official duties. When Senator Mike Gravel introduced the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional  record via a meeting through the Senate Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds, the Supreme Court ruled that even Gravel’s aides were protected by the Speech or Debate Clause. Which is to say, if Wyden truly wants to put an end to this farce, he is protected… and should stop hiding behind loyalty to such a plainly anti-democratic system.

Please tell us, Senator Wyden — in plain English — what violations of the law our government has committed.