http://www.nationalreview.com/node/355959/print
After repeatedly, and correctly, proclaiming that phone and e-mail surveillance by the NSA is both necessary and constitutional, the president has succumbed to left and libertarian pressure: He has proposed installation in NSA of “a full-time civil-liberties and privacy officer” and other mechanisms in “the transparency community.” A “transparency community” within an “intelligence community” is an unworkable oxymoron. Any “civil-liberties and privacy” officer installed in NSA would, to show that he is performing, have to impede intelligence activities — a burden we do not need in our already difficult war on terrorism.
Our Constitution’s authors and proponents warned against bowing to the sort of demagoguery that lies behind attacks on the NSA program as an unconstitutional invasion of our rights. The Federalist Papers — the bible of the Constitution’s meaning — warn at the outset (No. 1) of those who invoke supposed rights of the people to oppose the government’s efforts to defeat an enemy seeking to destroy us: “A dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people, than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government.”
Continuing, “Publius” (probably Alexander Hamilton) explains why: “History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing Demagogues and ending Tyrants.”
This warning is repeated: The Government’s “powers” for “the common defense . . . ought to exist without limitation: because it is impossible to foresee or define the extent and variety of national exigencies, or the correspondent extent and variety of the means which may be necessary to satisfy them” (No. 23). Again, our Founding Fathers opposed “every project that is calculated to disarm the government of a single weapon, which in any possible contingency might be usefully employed for the general defense and security” (No. 36).