The thing that is so depressing about these various attempts to adopt snooping laws is they are perennial. They get defeated, but they come back the next year with a new attempt. At some point we are guaranteed to fail to fight it off.

We are at a disadvantage here — like the inverse to the red brigades’ famous saying — we have to get lucky every time, they only need to get lucky once.

What is needed here is some kind of constitutional approach that places surveillance *outside* the realm of things that can be democratically adopted. If it is possible to adopt surveillance democratically, I guarantee we will do it.