When government officials and media pundits attempt to justify warrantless spying and other abuses, they resort to common arguments that we hear repeatedly, such as claiming that numerous terrorist plots are being disrupted as a result. Proof of these assertions is seldom provided because, they say, it is too secret for us to know. We’re supposed to just believe them because they say so.

Another method is to play down the abuses, portraying them as just minor intrusions, and nothing we need to worry about. When confronted with the Edward Snowden leaks showing the NSA’s massive surveillance of innocent Americans’ phone records and emails, President Obama resorted to this canard, saying that the enormous NSA seizures amount to only “modest encroachments.”

Then Obama went to a theme that we are hearing more frequently in the public discourse: that there is some kind of trade-off between liberty and security, and that we need to find the right “balance” between the two. In Obama’s opinion, NSA’s warrantless surveillance of every American “strikes the right balance.”

This is a convenient construct that requires you to accept the idea that our Constitutional rights have to be curtailed because we live in such a dangerous world, and that we need to give up some of them so the government can Keep us Safe.

If you can be fooled into acknowledging this fallacious premise, you are on a slippery slope, which is exactly where they want you. The first step to losing your rights is to accept that they are not absolute. From there, it is just a matter of how much and how fast you can lose them.

The whole reason the Bill of Rights was enacted was to enshrine certain rights into the Constitution, in keeping with the principle that they are “unalienable,” meaning that they are not subject to negotiation or compromise; that they are inherent in each individual and cannot be taken away by any ruler, king or government, for any reason.

This is a principle that some would like us to forget or ignore, and the phony “balance” debate is helping to serve that purpose.

-David Kasper