To get a sense of this renewed debate, I spoke with Baker and others who have spent years trying to resolve the trade-offs between the nation’s values and security in the context of counterterrorism, and who are now considering the same dilemma in light of the pandemic. All agreed that now is the time for Americans to have the difficult discussion about what changes they want to see and how far they want them to go. Terrorism and pandemics are two very different problems, to be sure, but there are lessons to be learned from how the country responded the last time it faced a defining crisis.

Ben Rhodes: The 9/11 era is over

There are already signs that the government is considering expanding its reach in response to the pandemic. The Justice Department has petitioned Congress for new emergency powers, including the ability to ask judges to detain people indefinitely without trial. Donald Trump has clamped down at the southern border and restricted asylum claims in the name of public health; on Monday, he announced that he will use an executive order to temporarily suspend immigration to the U.S. He publicly considered mandating a quarantine for the New York region, though he later walked back from that idea. He then declared that he has “total authority” over states in lifting social-distancing restrictions, before backtracking again. Digital surveillance, meanwhile, has quickly become a major focus for the government and tech companies alike; as my colleague Derek Thompson has explained, proponents of location-tracking and contact-tracing technology in particular believe that it could help end the pandemic more quickly. But even if that’s the case—and some cybersecurity experts contend that the utility of this sort of tracking during pandemics is far from clear—such technology still raises significant concerns.

These concerns are expressed by people such as Douglas London, who worked at the CIA for three decades before retiring last year, and whose career dealing with counterterrorism issues has led him to regard government surveillance with more skepticism than advocates such as Baker. He told me that he can envision a scenario in which the government proposes “a PATRIOT Act for pandemic monitoring and control”—a reference to the law enacted after 9/11 that gave the government more powers to fight terrorism while also laying the groundwork for sprawling new surveillance. “The invasion of personal privacy would offer the government strong technical surveillance tools to help in containing and rolling back a pandemic,” said London, who now teaches at Georgetown University. “But I think Americans should resist such measures. Once you give away those rights and privacies, you’re never going to get them back. And once the government has these powers, they can be used for other things, and they can be abused.”