ooking ahead to the next round of FISA debates, Democrats and civil liberties advocates need to rethink their public relations strategy. In fact, this recommendation applies beyond FISA to the larger civil liberties debate. It’s not enough to say that "Administration Policy X" threatens civil rights, the public needs to understand in a very concrete way why those rights matter. My non-empirically informed sense is that much of the public just doesn’t feel in their gut that these protections benefit them.
The reason, though, that these rights do matter -- the reason we care about them -- is quite simple. The rights protect people from abuse of power. Accordingly, the FISA amendment is a bad idea because the executive branch will inevitably abuse these new sweepingly-broad surveillance powers. It’s a lesson as old as written history -- unchecked authority is eventually used for improper reasons. Indeed, it’s the theoretical rationale of our entire constitutional structure.
To be sure, not every abuse of authority is as extreme as, say, actions in Nazi Germany. And people throw around unhelpful terms sometimes. But the unlikely probability of the most extreme abuses shouldn’t distract from the very real -- and inevitable -- abuse that will come if this law stays on the books. To understand what I mean, just look at the origins of FISA.
