The Chicago Tribune’s Steve Chapman starts by asking …

… a simple question: Do you trust the federal government not to misuse its power?

Libertarians like myself, as well as ACLU-type civil libertarians, generally don’t. Some liberals do, at least as long as someone like Barack Obama is in the Oval Office. Some conservatives feel the same way, but only when Republicans control the White House. Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, writing in National Review Online, argues, “The problem here is not government power. It is the government officials we’ve elected to wield it.”

I think he has it backward. It’s guaranteed that any government power will sooner or later wind up in the hands of the “wrong” people or party. So it’s essential to restrict that authority — or else not grant it at all. Otherwise, we are inviting intolerable abuses.

James Madison understood all this, which is why he favored sturdy checks and balances to keep power under control. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” he wrote in The Federalist papers. “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

The problem with existing counter-terrorism laws is that those checks have been neutralized. Congress seems to have had only a dim idea what the NSA was doing, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that approves such programs operates in secret, without hearing the side of anyone who might oppose broad monitoring of citizens.

Without effective checks on executive power, we’re dependent on the people in the White House to control themselves. The experience with George W. Bush and Barack Obama suggests that’s a losing bet.

Steve Spingola is similarly unconvinced with the Obama administration’s commitment to the truth:

The controversy surrounding the National Security Agency’s (NSA) metadata collection of the telephone records of Americans has resulted in statist politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, alleging that the NSA is not examining the content of our communications.

With history as our guide, Americans should know that the NSA is an agency that, to put it mildly, has a track record of being less than truthful, not only to the American people, but also to congress.  This is because its leaders believe that the misinformation they provide is justifiable under the ‘noble lie’ doctrine.

A “noble lie”—as defined by Plato in his book The Republic—is misinformation disseminated by members of the elite and/or governing classes to reduce social anxiety or to advance a hidden agenda. As those who have worked in law enforcement know it is perfectly lawful for an agent of the government to lie to the public, but a crime for a member of the public to lie to an agent of the state.  This is the ultimate ‘do as I say, not as I do’ rule of the governing class. …

William Binney is a former NSA engineer turned whistleblower.  While employed with the NSA, he designed a program that would have allowed the spy agency to identify the electronic communications of terror suspects while protecting the privacy of law-abiding Americans.  The NSA rejected this program outright.  Binney has emphatically stated that the NSA is retrieving the domestic telephone, e-mail, and Internet content of Americans.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuET0kpHoyM

Author and NSA expert James Bamford mentioned a few of the NSA’s eavesdropping programs in his outstanding book, The Shadow Factory. Because much of the world’s electronic communications has shifted from satellites to ocean-buried fiber optic cables, the NSA has sought and obtained access to these cable links.  One example is the AT&T center in San Francisco, where, with that company’s consent, the NSA established a so-called listening room; whereby, NSA operatives installed software that records and catalogs the electronic content Americans’ communications.

Ironically, while the federal government requires companies to provide consumers with privacy notices, the same government has granted telecoms that violate these privacy agreements, by providing users’ information to the NSA, with immunity from civil and criminal prosecution.  Moreover, the government also forbids these telecoms from disclosing that their privacy policies are worth no more than the paper they are written to those they service.

In other words, our own government is feeding its citizens one noble lie after another.

This is precisely why those who pay attention to the NSA believe that the agency has recorded, cataloged, and stored between 21 – 25 trillion telephone conversations, many involving Americans, since 9/11.  The purpose of the 1,000,000 square foot Utah Data Center, built at a cost of $2 billion, is to retrieve, record, and store telephone conversations, e-mails, credit card transactions, faxes, and even encrypted data.  That way, should an individual later be identified as a person of interest, federal investigators can obtain a warrant from a FISA judge to access the content of their NSA dossier. …

As we learned during the Nixon administration and, now, during the current Obama administration’s IRS scandal, sensitive information in government hands can be used by political hacks to gather dirt on political opponents of the government or to embarrass those who dare speak out (as the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover did to Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.).

This of course gives the lie to such Obama statements as …

• “When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That’s not what this program is about. … What the intelligence is doing is looking at phone numbers, and durations of calls; they are not looking at people’s names and they’re not looking at content. … If the intelligence committee actually wants to listen to a phone call they have to go back to a federal judge, just like they would in a criminal investigation.”
• “With respect to the Internet and emails, this does not apply to U.S. citizens and it does not apply to people living in the United States.” (Wrong.)
• NSA agents “cherish our Constitution. The last thing they’d be doing is taking programs like this to listen to someone’s phone calls. …  You can shout Big Brother or program run amok, but if you actually look at the details, I think we’ve struck the right balance.”
• “If people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress, and don’t trust federal judges, to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution with due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.”

Actually, he’s right about the last one. We do have some problem here. Absent actual evidence, not merely assertions, there is no reason to believe the Obama administration (last seen using the Internal Revenue Service to harass conservatives) nor their sycophants (including the Republican ones) in Congress that the Obama administration has been successful in stopping even one terrorist plot.

Remember: You can love your country and hate the government.