More broadly, today's speech is a reminder of how thoroughly Barack Obama has been co-opted by the national-security state, compared to his days as a U.S. senator, when he so eloquently articulated the dangerous excesses of the War on Terror. (Today's most striking example is the way he described the CIA's torture of prisoners during the Bush Administration as "enhanced interrogation techniques." His deference to the CIA's feelings certainly has blossomed.)

What's wrong with the story Obama now tells about surveillance? Several significant things, actually.

The president began his speech on NSA reform by harkening back to "the dawn of our republic," when a small, secret "surveillance committee" was established in Boston. "The group’s members included Paul Revere," he said, "and at night they would patrol the streets, reporting back any signs that the British were preparing raids." In this telling, the patriots, literal revolutionaries rebelling against the government of their day, were forerunners of the National Security Agency.

That is egregious historical malpractice. In fact, King George's colonial overseers and the general warrants they enforced are much closer analogues to domestic-surveillance efforts today. Had colonial governors had access to five years of communications metadata and "two-hop" network analysis, it is highly likely that they would've arrested the Founding Fathers, tried them for treason, and sentenced them to death for their crimes.

Obama is on firmer ground a bit later in his speech, when he talks about the importance of codebreakers during World War II and the subsequent need for foreign intelligence during the Cold War, when the threat of nuclear annihilation was significant. But his segue from the end of the Cold War to the War on Terror is a foundation more wobbly than much of America is yet willing to recognize. Yes, terrorism poses a scary threat to our safety. But as horrific as the September 11 attacks were, as much as we mourn the 3,000 people who died in those attacks, and as much as we ought to guard against future attacks, the loss suffered that day is not comparable to the existential threat posed by the U.S.S.R. The balance between security and liberty ought to be tilting toward the latter, even as surveillance on a scale unprecedented in U.S. history is expanded yearly.

The whole War on Terror has unfolded according to similar illogic. National-security leaders behave as if preventing even a single terrorist attack is so important that, to marginally decrease its likelihood, it was incumbent upon us to torture prisoners, invade Iraq, and establish a system of mass surveillance on hundreds of millions of innocents to identify a tiny minority of terrorists. So long as the NSA is charged with stopping every Boston bombing-style attack, and given more power until it can do so, it will verge toward totalitarianism, because no society can stay free and eliminate the risk of terrorism. That truth is one that can never be found in Obama's speeches.