For Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review, a British citizen who has written eloquently about the dangers of the NSA's domestic spying, these reforms go too far, "according to foreigners bulwarks to which they have no claim." Efforts to do so are "the product of fluffy one-world types who haven’t so much taken a libertarian exception to national-security overreach as folded the revelations into a toxic Weltanschauung that perceives America to be a global bully and force for ill," he argues. "If President Obama indulges this instinct, he will be abdicating his most elemental responsibility as the chief executive of the national government: to protect Americans from those who would do them harm."

After summarizing his substantial, strongly held objections to the NSA's domestic activities, he concludes that the problem is "an agency that is tasked with spying overseas has turned its attention to the homeland," not that the NSA is doing the job assigned to it. "The NSA isn’t just allowed to spy broadly outside of the United States," he writes. "That is precisely what it should be doing. The legal and moral questions that critics have posed to the NSA make sense only within the United States."

As a foreign national, he adds, he certainly isn't claiming that only Americans possess privacy rights. He just believes that, as a matter of law, "only two sets of people—American citizens and those within the country’s borders—are entitled to the legal protection of the Constitution," and that as a practical and moral matter

... a foreign power’s violating your privacy and your own government’s doing so are by no means the same thing. For the vast majority of people, the practical importance of one’s secrets being obtained by one’s own government considerably outweigh the importance of their being obtained by a foreign power.

These are not ridiculous arguments. A government spying on its own citizens really does present unique dangers; the NSA's activities abroad are far less legally dubious than its mass spying on the communications of American citizens; and foreign intelligence really is a prudent and legitimate thing to gather. Additionally, I find the presidential panel's suggested ban on foreign spying "based solely on that person's political views or religious convictions" to be puzzling. If an influential Saudi cleric's religious conviction is that all infidels ought to be killed, or if a rising Chinese official's political view is that America should be expelled from the Pacific islands by force, aren't those legitimate reasons to watch them?

I'd nevertheless go a lot farther than Cooke would to protect foreigners from current and future excesses of the U.S. surveillance state, both for their sake and for ours. The United States has an inherent right to defend itself from foreign threats. Beyond that, it has no moral claim to intrude into the private affairs of foreigners, and doing so in certain ways could certainly make it a force for ill. It's perhaps more useful to speak specifically about what I'd allow and what I'd forbid than to attempt an articulation of first principles, which I'm still working out.