When the first leaks began to come out about NSA surveillance, the Obama Administration sought to replace demands for reform with promises of increased transparency. Apparently even that’s too much to hope for now.

With Congressional bills from pro-surveillance factions pushing transparency, Obama Administration officials are now condemning those plans as well, insisting they are a threat to national security.

Providing any details about the programs, they insist, “crosses the line of the appropriate balance between transparency and national security.” They provided no alternative beyond the status quo, however.

Any change at all appears too much like trying from the Obama Administration’s point of view: as a proposal to have the NSA estimate how often they accidentally swept up Americans in their surveillance was condemned as “time consuming,” and a waste of resources.