Rationalizing an authoritarian surveillance state is naive.

[TheKentuckian]

69. Way closer to cut and dry than all the excuses and catch phrases want to think

Civil Right (access to rights) and Civil Liberties (the rights themselves) are of one piece, of no honest and generally practical use without the other.

The debate on the need for probable cause and reasonable suspicion has been had, you just missed it by a couple going on 300 years, I suggest those that for whatever reasons want to re-open those multi-thousand year spanning conclusions come up with a rationale that comes pre-loaded with tangible answers to deal with why we placed such limits in the first place, which there clearly isn't beyond hope for the best people and some good fortune even then because no one is perfect.

Shit, we know that this Administration has been slapped back by the rubberstamp of rubberstamps for violating the present very weak to the point of deep danger interpretations of these limits on the government. God only knows what wicked insanity was going on under Bush.

This means that some things are too dangerous to be allowed because the best we can hope for, much less expect is a constant pushing up against and push back on limits. If you can't get your Constitutional Scholar, transparency in government, no lipstick on pigs Democrat to not undermine in secret then you can't trust it with even a lesser Democrat, much less the plausibility of another TeaPubliKlan who are largely worse in any discernible way than the last fucking monster we had.

Given any serious length of time there is a 99.999999999999999999999999 of this going off the rails and I'm not talking about any hundred years. There has been no evolutionary advance in humans that has happened that changes the game to allow such practices without great entropy. The terrorism is far safer, less resourced, and pervasive. The two are not even on the same scale as threats to our civilization.

Your "cure" is orders of magnitude more dangerous than the disease.

I'm not as a rosey thinker as some, it is my belief that against a determined terrorist movement of any magnitude that it is not possible to completely stop all attacks in anything even approaching a free society.

There is the distinct possibility that we no longer live in a free society either because measures so extreme have been taken that we have destroyed it in trying to save it or because such a threat was greatly overstated and flogged to justify such measures in a willful effort to subvert our free society.
Well...there is the possibility that such a thing was always more bullshit than anything else and if we aspire to such a thing we must be much less the sheep and carve it out from those that chain us in lies.

Somethings just can't be balanced because they consume or destroy balance by their nature. The balance is to accept the wise limitations and the dangers that come with that acceptance because to do anything else almost certainly creates an existential threat to the ability to have rights at all. Priority never winks out of existence in a compromise when a real human being makes a call a person cannot serve two masters.