Many “serious people” are beginning to make the case that it’s time for the outrage and indignation over the NSA’s mass surveillance to subside and give way to a “national conversation” about how much privacy and liberty we are willing to trade for security, which they argue is a “choice we have to make.” Today at Reason I argue that until we have good reason to trust the oversight mechanisms that we are told will keep the system honest—or indeed trust the mechanisms for formulating such an oversight regime—civil libertarians have no reason to feel sheepish about obstinately refusing to make that “choice we have to make.”
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