If a report by Michael Isikoff, Matthew Cole, and Richard Esposito of NBC News is correct, the NSA domestic spying effort is even worse than we realized. It is bad enough to collect massive amounts of data on Americans' electronic communications, but allowing unknown people to access that data with no audit trail showing who looked at what is an invitation to tyranny.

NBC reports:

More than two months after documents leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden first began appearing in the news media, the National Security Agency still doesn't know the full extent of what he took, according to intelligence community sources, and is "overwhelmed" trying to assess the damage.

Officials, including NSA Director Keith Alexander, have assured the public that the government knows the scope of the damage, but two separate sources briefed on the matter told NBC News that the NSA has been unable to determine how many documents he took and what they are.

Even those people who think that it is OK for the government to sift through our telecommunications traffic looking for terrorists have to be concerned with the notion that people (authorized or not) can access their communications with no way to prove who accessed it. This is an open invitation to abuse, comparable to leaving a pile of money out for anyone who wishes to loot it.

The fact is that the federal government is now constructing vast databases about individual Americans, including their health records, as part of Obamacare's electronic medical records provisions, and supplying data to the so-called "navigators" who are being deployed to sign-up people for Obamacare. Those navigators are not being vetted with background checks, which is an open invitation to crooks who could use that information for identity theft and other nefarious purposes.

Call me a cynic, but I do not want federal officials to be able to spy on me at all, much less without leaving a trail to show that they are accessing the information.