In response to Dana Priest's superb report about our national-security state, Glenn Greenwald says that "we keep sacrificing our privacy to the always-growing National Security State in exchange for less security."
This important point is made in much more detail in Stephen Holmes's unfortunately neglected The Matador's Cape. Many people simply assume that there's a straightforward trade-off between civil liberties and national security -- in other words, that restrictions on civil liberties made for the sake of national security are presumed to be effective, and the only question is whether the loss of liberty is worth it. But as Holmes explains, the idea that secrecy and spur-of-the-moment decisions produce effective security policy is dubious. It's also based on theories of government that are otherwise alien to liberal democracy. In practice, as we saw during the Bush administration, lack of scrutiny produces slipshod analysis and incompetent personnel. In many cases, violations of civil liberties in the name of national security actually undermine it, and these civil-rights erosions can linger into subsequent administrations even after we forget about the emergency-response logic that justified them.
--Scott Lemieux
