When the police officers knock on your door with a warrant, they don't expect you to give them a tour. It's supposed to be an adversarial process so that it's used in these extraordinary powers are applied only when there's no alternative. Only when they're absolutely necessary, and only when they're proportionate to the threat faced by these individuals.

[I watch] all that stuff - Game of Thrones and all the other series. How about House of Cards? As for Boardwalk Empire - that's another period of government overreach, but at least they use the amendment process! In real life, the executive branch, by violating the Constitution, is using statutes in place of constitutional amendments to diminish our liberty.

I must say I'm surprised by how skeptical of the [Barack] Obama administration The Nation has been.

How do we preserve our civil rights, our traditions as a liberal democracy, in a time when government power is expanding and is more and more difficult to check?

I've been watching The Wire recently.

We need to think about encryption not as this sort of arcane, black art. It's a basic protection.

It's fascinating to see how things have changed. Basically, every time the US government gets off the soapbox of the Sunday-morning talk shows, the average American's support for the surveillance revelations grows.