Announcing a new Senate subcommittee devoted to privacy, Senators Leahy (D‑VT) and Franken (D‑MN) said nothing about privacy threats from government.

A “boom of new technologies over the last several years has … put an unprecedented amount of personal information into the hands of large companies that are unknown and unaccountable to the American public,” Franken said, according to an AFP report.

A boom of new technologies has put an unprecedented amount of personal information into the hands of the federal government—in some cases, illegally. It takes a lot of gall to point at commercial data collection from the atop the dunghill of federal privacy invasion. But there’s a lot of gall to go around in Washington, D.C.