When the government watches, who watches the government?

Reason reports that Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act grants the federal government broad powers to collect communications, and that those powers are again before Congress for renewal — with, the piece argues, insufficient examination of how they have been used against the very citizens they are said to protect.

I will confess at once that the technical architecture of modern surveillance is far beyond anything I could have encountered. I am told, however, that the civic shape of the question is one I recognize entirely: when does the state's power to protect the public become the state's power to observe and constrain it? That question was not born in any century's technology. It was old when the Parliament issued general warrants against John Wilkes, and it animated the Fourth Amendment's insistence on particularity — that no officer of government should sweep broadly through the private life of a citizen on the mere hope of finding something useful.

The counsel I would offer Congress is this: haste in renewal is itself a policy choice, and not a neutral one. When a government grows accustomed to a power, it grows reluctant to relinquish it, and the bureaucracies entrusted with that power grow skilled at defending it. Reason is correct, as I infer from the lead, that the question deserves unhurried deliberation rather than reflexive reauthorization. The office of the legislature is precisely to subject executive instruments to scrutiny before extending them — not after.

I am equally wary of the faction that would surrender every liberty for safety and the faction that would surrender every security for the appearance of principle. Neither extreme honors the compact the citizens made with one another. The proper disposition is neither panic nor indifference, but rigorous, public examination: what has this authority actually been used for, against whom, under what oversight, and with what demonstrated necessity? Those are not hostile questions. They are the republic's due diligence.

There is also the matter of precedent, which I have always regarded as precious beyond its immediate occasion. Powers granted in urgency and renewed in habit become, in time, the ordinary furniture of government — so familiar that no one remembers the room was furnished differently. If Congress extends Section 702 without genuine reform, it does not merely decide the question for today; it decides the question for every administration that follows, under conditions no one present can fully foresee.

My counsel is plain: let the deliberation be slow, the hearings be public, the amendments be serious, and the sunset provisions be real. A free people does not prove its strength by trusting its government without limit. It proves its strength by demanding accountability — and meaning it.