Washington Post national security correspondent William Arkin writes that media coverage of government surveillance activities has given us “a lot of confusion — tons of overstatement, ugly partisan posturing and a Hollywood trailer of government omniscience and evil that drives me to offer an apology if I’ve contributed anything to the mindless frenzy.” His post is worth reading in full, but here’s an excerpt:

Let me make my opinion clear: The Bush administration has been arrogant and incompetent in communicating to the American public. It has cynically split the country into red and blue in order to give itself greater power to pursue a wrong-headed national security strategy that it claims is red, white and blue.
The Congress has also utterly failed in five months to get to the bottom of the NSA’s warantless surveillance program and thereby resolve its legality and assuage public anxiety.
But having said all of that, there is no enemies list.

Arkin goes on to give a very accurate, detailed description of the types of surveillance programs that have been in the news recently, how they differ and how they have been conflated by a media that is more interested in Hollywood imagery than context. As I said, read it all. (h/t Bob L.)