Julian has a great piece in the American Spectator reminding conservatives that they used to care about civil liberties:
After the humiliations of Watergate, however, conservative legal thinkers began to insist that Congress and the courts had overstepped their bounds. During the Reagan administration, the Heritage Foundation began urging repeal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which had been passed in 1978 as a result of the Church Committee’s findings.
The campaign stalled due in large part not to the hand wringing of civil libertarians but to the opposition of the intelligence community. “We hear people say we can’t get the surveillance we need or can’t meet the court’s standard,” said Edward O’Malley, who headed the FBI’s intelligence division under President Reagan. “That’s just not true. We have no problem getting the surveillance we need, and the court also has protected the rights of Americans, which is necessary. … We support this 100 percent.”
There were then, as there are now, exceptions on the right. The FISA law — now damned by conservatives as an impossibly burdensome, possibly even unconstitutional obstacle to legitimate executive surveillance — was opposed by the New York Times’s designated conservative columnist William Safire, who feared that it would “turn every telephone instrument in every home into a suspected household spy.”
Acknowledging conservatives “natural inclination to help the law,” Safire nevertheless urged that it be trumped by “a responsibility to protect the law-abiding individual from the power of government to intrude.” By then, however, he was probably in the minority among right wingers.
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