Statements like these are worth raising now in part because Wisconsin's Tea Party voters ought to understand that, when they replaced Feingold with Senator Ron Johnson in 2010, they traded a civil-libertarian prescient in the abuses he anticipated with someone who is worthless on this issue. These bygone quotes matter to the rest of us insofar as they illustrate something that Julian Sanchez observed about secretive intelligence programs and oversight. One reason it often proves insufficient, Sanchez explained, is that "when legislators do become aware of problems, their ability to mobilize support for reform is hampered by their own inability to go public with their concerns."

Sanchez, a brilliant guy who has studied these issues closely for years, observed in a separate item that, despite listening to Feingold's warnings as he made them -- along with warnings by Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall -- he was surprised by what Edward Snowden has revealed. "When I contemplated the most paranoid scenarios for how the government might use the Patriot Act's §215 'business record' authority that still seemed realistic, I did not imagine they would use it to routinely collect all Americans' phone (and perhaps Internet) records for years at a time," he wrote at Cato. "I thought perhaps in a panic they might do something similar for an entire city over the course of a month. Clearly, I was thinking too small."

Last week in Wisconsin, speaking to an audience of Democrats, Feingold said, "I don't come to you tonight as an officeholder. I don't come to you tonight as a candidate -- at least not in 2013, 2014, or 2015." In 2016, the man who beat him, Johnson, is up for reelection. If Feingold managed to retake his seat, he would be a welcome presence in the Senate for civil libertarians (despite his ill-conceived campaign-finance bill that did nothing to make the system less corrupt).

Senators Rand Paul, Wyden, and others could use the help.