I have always held that the natural condition of a free people is to be, in the ordinary course of their lives, unwatched. Not because they have anything to hide, but because the habit of being watched changes the watched. A citizen who knows that every letter may be read, every movement logged, every association noted, is no longer wholly free, whatever the law may still permit him on paper. He begins to govern himself by the imagined judgment of the state, and a self so governed has already surrendered the independence that makes citizenship mean anything.

There is a distinction the modern age blurs and ought to restore. A free people may consent to be read in the aggregate. That the government should know how many travel a road, or how a disease spreads through a county, threatens no one. But they have always required consent to be read by name. The gathering of the individual record, the particular citizen's papers and effects and whereabouts, into a permanent and searchable ledger is a different thing in kind, not merely in degree.

The apologists say the tools are necessary against real dangers, and I do not doubt that dangers are real. But I have observed across a long life that power, once granted for an emergency, is rarely returned when the emergency passes; it merely awaits the next occasion. The safer course is to bind the instrument in advance: to require the particular warrant, named and justified, before the state may turn its gaze upon the particular person.

Guard the right to be let alone. It is not the least of liberties. It is the precondition of all the others.