Better in their words…

I trust the NSA before most “protectors of privacy rights”, too.
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Every week, Typhoon Obama changes course to upend some new corner of the private or public sector.

The ObamaCare botch is well along to costing Democrats control of Congress. This week Mr. Obama offhandedly told the New Yorker that smoking marijuana is hardly different than having a Miller Lite, a random presidential thought that undermines the work of anyone associated with drug and alcohol abuse. Last weekend was spent following grimly amusing news alerts about how the U.N. abruptly invited Iran to join the Syria “peace talks,” thinking that was what Mr. Obama wanted. Think again. And again.

In advance of whatever folly is planned for this weekend, let’s pause in seriousness to consider the future of the National Security Agency. Its status has been on the bubble since June, when Edward Snowden first unloaded documents he stole from the agency.

Set aside that on Sunday the chairs of the Senate and House intelligence committees—Democrat Dianne Feinstein and Republican Mike Rogers —suggested strongly that Mr. Snowden’s heist may have been abetted by Russia. His tendentious leaks have damaged only the U.S. Mr. Snowden’s future as a famous American may be closer to the Rosenbergs than to Paul Revere.

Public support for the agency has fallen, and a bipartisan effort is on in Congress to limit the NSA. As is his habit, Mr. Obama, the person nominally in charge of the NSA, let the problem fester for months. Now all sides are dug in.

Last Friday morning the president stepped forward to give his two cents’ worth. After defending the NSA’s function, Mr. Obama announced the agency’s collection of telephone metadata would be done by a nongovernmental “option”—and told Congress’s 535 commanders in chief to figure out what that option will be.

By leading from so far behind on the NSA controversy, Mr. Obama let the Snowden brigades define the problem. Now public paranoia has overwhelmed the realities of protecting the United States from its enemies.

Watching too many Hollywood movies like “Enemy of the State” isn’t the healthiest way to think straight about U.S. security. The NSA has not been a rogue intel operation run out of someone’s back pocket. The NSA surveillance program operates under a federal law debated in public and passed by Congress in 1978, then revised by a vote in 2001.

That public law is 50 USC Ch. 36: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance. At great length, it defines what the NSA can and cannot do and who watches them (a special 11-judge court). It includes a five-year prison sentence for anyone in the government who abuses data about a U.S. citizen.

The use of signals intelligence to monitor communications via phones, wire, radio, satellites and now the Internet has been the NSA’s bread-and-butter function from its creation in 1952 through the Korean War, Cold War, Vietnam and this war against homicidal Islamic fundamentalists. The agency has had intelligence failures, but there’s no evidence of routinely ruining U.S. citizens. The record should count for something.

What is at issue in this controversy is one’s understanding of the nature of threat, from terrorism to local muggers. Across the broad swath of the American population, most people think threats are a reality and want protection from them. That every town in the U.S. has a police force reveals a consensus about flawed humanity. But on the left and right edges of U.S. politics, the imminence of threat is always a secondary concern.

For liberals, disbelievers in evil, no threat is ever as bad as conservatives say it is, whether Churchill warning about Hitler in the 1930s, Reagan about the need for missile defenses, or U.S. street crime. When Rudolph Giuliani sought to bring New York’s crime wave under control, the left called him Rudolph Mussolini, and they meant it.

Libertarian objections are more principled, but like the left, they undersell the effort and achievements of a democracy across 200 years to build durable legal protections for individual citizens—from abuse and from danger.

The Edward Snowdens and Glenn Greenwalds of the left, the real paranoids, think the U.S. is always a step away from becoming a fascist state, and so their answer is to disadvantage and weaken America’s security institutions, whether the New York police or the NSA. If Rand Paul is considering a presidential run, he will need to explain why his views won’t do the same thing.

There should be recourse if abuse occurs. Public bureaucracies are poor at policing their bullies. And too many individuals get sucked into wrongful federal or local prosecutions. Eric Holder’s unconstrained Justice Department threatens reporters for doing their jobs. Siccing the IRS on voluntary political groups is a disgrace. This isn’t systemic breakdown. It’s political abuse, whose solution is a new government, as soon as possible.

We would be lucky indeed if other legal authorities in the U.S. were as small a threat to liberty as the NSA’s metadata program. If the choice is bowing to Edward Snowden’s ultimatum from Moscow or letting the NSA flow my phone number into 124 billion others this month, I’ll place my fate with the NSA.

Write to henninger@wsj.com Henninger: The Snowden Ultimatum – WSJ.com.