The government has protected your security and privacy better than you think

[Commentary] After 9/11, US political leaders of all stripes demanded better intelligence and a greater ability to “connect the dots.” Such a terrorist attack had to be prevented from happening again. Well, it has happened again, of course, repeatedly, in Paris, as well as in London, Madrid and, indeed, in Boston and nearly in Times Square. But until the recent brutality of the Islamic State, the pendulum of our response, naturally enough, had swung back toward privacy and away from national security. We must now rethink how far we want — and need — our government to go to keep us safe from people who unequivocally want to kill as many of us as cruelly as they can. In hindsight, our country’s handling of the putative trade-off between national security and privacy after Sept. 11 has actually been reasonably reassuring.

There is no need to trade privacy for security. Rather, the post-9/11 record demonstrates that we can monitor aggressively if we also remain equally committed to the compensating system of checks, balances, oversight and other safeguards that can prevent abuses and excesses that would offend the values that make us Americans. Let’s be sure we keep it that way.

[Alan Charles Raul, a partner at the law firm Sidley Austin, was vice chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board from 2006 to 2008]