Would the government lie to you?

This is the emerging defense of the government in “the metadata scandal.” President Obama told a California audience Friday that before he was president he, too, had “a healthy skepticism” of the aggressive intelligence services, but now, with further safeguards, which he did not identify, he decided that snooping is worth it.

“You can’t have 100 percent security, and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” he says. A speechwriter’s clever line, but it was an answer to a question that nobody had raised. Critics of Big Brother don’t expect a hundred percent of anything, they just don’t trust the big bully more than maybe 2 percent.

James Clapper, director of U.S. intelligence, pours on a little soothing syrup. The snooping, he says, “cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen, any other U.S. persons located outside the United States.” Of course not. But note the weasel word “intentionally,” and what, exactly, is a “U.S. person” if he is not a citizen? The Washington Post reports that, while in one surveillance program American citizens are not “intended” to be targets of surveillance, large quantities of “content” from Americans are nevertheless screened to track or learn more about the target.

Fear is a great motivator, and in the wake of 9/11 the politicians, frightened themselves, used fear of further attacks to persuade us to give in to the darkest terrors of the night. We tolerated the intrusions of the security state, the groping in the long lines at the airports, the barriers around government buildings. George W. Bush even allowed the Secret Service to close Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House to use as a convenient parking lot for government cars. In a fit of fear we assumed, as Peggy Noonan observes in the Wall Street Journal, that “we’ll just do it now, and down the road we can stop it. It’s just an emergency thing. We can make it go away when we no longer want it. But can we? Do government programs tend to remain static, or wither? Or do they tend to grow?”

The intelligence services do some good things, and presidents necessarily rely on them, though new presidents get intelligence briefings designed to scare them into going along with schemes they once reviled. The world is truly a scarier place than the rest of us can imagine. But the spooks have to be watched, listened to - but not necessarily agreed with. Spooks by nature see the world through dark glasses and look for shortcuts across the Constitution to “do evil so that good may come.”