Discussion: What is the right balance between privacy and security?

The Fourth Amendment restricts unreasonable searches on individuals but imposes few limits on collection and analysis, and technologies have no privacy rights. The NSA is screening the data system in general for conduct that threatens the security of the system, not targeting any particular individual or group using the system. The right comparison is a cop on a beat who patrols public spaces. He's not investigating a crime or enforcing a law; he's watching for suspicious behavior. As the legal scholar Philip Bobbitt argued in his important 2008 book "Terror and Consent," antiterror methods ought to be "measured not only against the liberties these practices constrict, but also with respect to the liberties they may protect." Data-mining is a tool to infer patterns and relationships, but you can't connect the dots without, well, dots. There really is safety in numbers. The de minimis costs to individuals of data-mining are worth the benefits for society at large, which include not being blown to smithereens on your morning commute. Some commentators assert an abstract sense that the government has gone too far, but liberty cannot exist absent the basic conditions of security. A government that cannot ensure peace also cannot protect individual rights. Alexander Hamilton in the first installment of the Federalist notes that "the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty" and "their interest can never be separated." His famous disquisition about "energy in the executive" in Federalist 70 is that power vindicates "the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy." Certainly data-mining could be abused, though leaker Edward Snowden has offered no such evidence, unlike the politicized IRS. But the risks of abuse must be measured in proportion to the damage they might prevent.

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