The NSA Speech: Obama Accepts the Logic of Staying Terrorized

The president began his speech on NSA reform by harkening back to “the dawn of our republic,” when a small, secret “surveillance committee” was established in Boston. “The group’s members included Paul Revere,” he said, “and at night they would patrol the streets, reporting back any signs that the British were preparing raids.” In this telling, the patriots, literal revolutionaries rebelling against the government of their day, were forerunners of the National Security Agency.

.. National-security leaders behave as if preventing even a single terrorist attack is so important that, to marginally decrease its likelihood, it was incumbent upon us to torture prisoners, invade Iraq, and establish a system of mass surveillance on hundreds of millions of innocents to identify a tiny minority of terrorists. So long as the NSA is charged with stopping every Boston bombing-style attack, and given more power until it can do so, it will verge toward totalitarianism, because no society can stay free and eliminate the risk of terrorism.

.. Yes, the intelligence agencies are filled with lots of honest, honorable Americans, but for goodness’ sake, the men who spied on Martin Luther King were the friends and family members of regular Americans. They had churches they attended and preachers they honored.