Review 9/11 threat, response: Our view

The Editorial Board | USATODAY

Throughout American history, the balance between security and liberty has swung back and forth depending on the circumstances of the times.

Most notoriously in the modern era, more than 100,000 Japanese Americans were detained in camps in the western U.S. during World War II. President Franklin D. Roosevelt regarded the internment as a necessary precaution; today, it is considered a shameful overreaction.

After 9/11, an attack even more shocking and lethal than Pearl Harbor, citizens wanted the government to keep them safe and didn't much want to know the messy details, even if the methods involved torture or illegal eavesdropping.

A dozen years later, the fear has subsided, and Americans are learning more every day about the colossal surveillance state that has sprung up. It's time for a thorough reassessment of what's necessary to protect the nation — particularly from attacks involving chemical, biological or nuclear weapons — and what is an intolerable breach of privacy.

Largely because of leaker-turned-fugitive Edward Snowden, so many revelations about surveillance programs have emerged in the past three months that it's hard to keep track of them all. Among them:

Documents obtained by Snowden confirmed the existence of a National Security Agency program, first disclosed in 2006 by USA TODAY , to compile the phone records of tens of million of Americans into a vast database.

A separate NSA program allows the agency to obtain private information about users of Google, Facebook, Yahoo and other Internet companies.

U.S. and British intelligence agencies are attempting to undo online privacy by cracking encryption designed to provide security in private sector transactions.

The U.S. intelligence community has 16 spy agencies with 107,035 employees and a "black budget" of $52.6 billion this year. That's more than Washington spends on the Transportation, Labor, Interior and Commerce departments combined.

To the NSA, these programs, with code names such as PRISM and Bullrun, are legitimate tools. But the problem is that once such programs start, they are difficult to end and are prone to abuse.

It's not difficult to imagine a future president, one with the paranoid tendencies of a Richard Nixon, employing such tools in a bid to destroy political opponents. It's even easier to imagine people of lesser rank or private contractors abusing them, for either well-intentioned or malevolent reasons.

That's why a recalibration is needed in light of the evolving terror threat, which comes less from the degraded central al-Qaeda organization and more from splinter groups or self-activated jihadists such as the Boston Marathon bombers.

Ideally, this reassessment would be done by Congress and the group of experts established this summer by President Obama, and it would review everything from airport security to the phone records program to Internet snooping.

If more political cover is required, create a panel, modeled after the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, with a mandate to preserve the successes of the response, curb the excesses — and give the security-liberty pendulum a nudge back toward the center.

USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature.