Jay Stanley over at the ACLU blog posts an illustrative table that gets to the heart of the NSA controversies these days. As he makes note, when defenders of the NSA’s surveillance state are confronted with allegations of unlawfulness, overreach, or scandal as a result of Edward Snowden’s leaks, they like to emphasize their deep commitment to “keeping the country safe.”

Critics of the NSA programs, on the other hand, don’t buy it. We think the NSA isn’t so much looking out for the country as it is looking out for itself. And we praise Edward Snowden as a hero, instead of a maligning him as a traitor.

Stanley lays out the two paradigms of belief:

Top priority: protecting the nation. Our national security establishment—from the president to the heads of the three-letter agencies to the mid-level officials who make the gears turn—are focused on nothing but trying to protect the nation from harm. While occasional abuses by individual “bad apples” may take place, overall these institutions respect the Constitution and the rule of law and are just doing what they must to protect the nation. Top priority: protecting themselves. Our national security establishment, while full of well-intentioned people trying their best to protect the nation, should primarily be understood as a giant bureaucratic entity governed by a dynamic that is bigger than the sum of these parts, and as primarily concerned with expanding its own powers and domain and defending its reputation.

Below is the table, which seems to prove paradigm 2 is correct. As Stanley puts it:

The evidence seems clear: national security is the justification for our security establishment’s existence and powers, but self-preservation, defense of prerogatives and reputation, and expansion of powers is truly mission number one. In fact, as I argued recently, the most useful way to think about the national security state is as a gigantic beast with impulses that need to be carefully controlled. Naïve understandings of our security agencies will lead to inadequate checks and balances. Reforms aimed at reining in these out-of-control agencies must be predicated on a sophisticated understanding of their true character.

Click continue to see the table…