One must struggle to get past the sneering dismissal Max Boot makes of any and all civil liberties concerns people have with the Endless War Against Evil, er, Terror. Even after all his jabs at our “silliness,” he pauses to admit FISA was justified after J Edgar Hoover and Dick Nixon. Still, he says FISA is now archaic and should be “euthanized.” Let the President do anything he wants to (he is already, by the way) and hope whistle-blowers shall set us free again (ignoring this administration’s efforts, like Nixon’s, to seal all leaks but the ones they use for their own purposes).

Forget privacy, we need to spy more by Max Boot, Los Angeles Times

If civil liberties agitators, grandstanding politicians and self-righteous newspaper editorialists have their way, we will have to give up our most potent line of defense because of largely hypothetical concerns about privacy violations. …

All this concern with privacy would be touching if it weren’t so selective. With a few keystrokes, Google will display anything posted by or about you. … Such information is routinely gathered and sold by myriad marketing outfits. So it’s OK to violate your privacy to sell you something — but not to protect you from being blown up. [mjh: nonsense, Max — it’s bad enough when marketers do it, worse when it’s the government.]

HOW FAR DO the civil-liberties absolutists want to take their logic? [mjh: he continues with a specious straw man argument about Miranda warnings in Afganistan.] …

Much of this silliness can be traced to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which for the first time made judges the overseers of our spymasters. This was an understandable reaction to such abuses as the FBI’s wiretapping of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. But FISA is a luxury we can no longer afford. …

This archaic law should be euthanized. Replace it with legislation that gives the president permission to order any surveillance deemed necessary….

So far there has been no suggestion that the NSA has done anything with disreputable motives. The administration has nothing to be ashamed of. The only scandal here is that some people favor unilateral disarmament in our struggle against the suicide bombers.

It is touching how much faith people have that our technology will stop determined lunatics who use box cutters and donkey carts, if only the whining civil libertarians would get out of the way. mjh

PS: I can’t read “Max Boot” without thinking what a great name it would be for a fascist: he meets all enemies of freedom with Max Boot. I wonder if he chose his name like Homer Simpson chose “Max Power.”

Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both. — Benjamin Franklin