<p>Ari, </p>
<p>I think I understand your position and that your answer to issue 1 would be that civil liberties should always (or virtually always) trump national security. I understand and respect that even though we might disagree. In general, I think people who disagree on issue 1 have different views of how credible foreign threats are to a nation like the US. You might believe that the range of potential harms, while possible or even probable, would not destroy our nation. I probably have a lower tolerance for risk of harm and a greater tolerance for permitting civil liberties to be abridged. </p>
<p>In my view, these are the issues our Founding Fathers faced but I don’t think they agreed on the answers any more than you and I do. What they gave us was a system to resolve these disputes, not a system to predetermine them.</p>