A baffling chart, courtesy of peacemaker.net
Over at the Times, Thomas Friedman has invoked his own slippery slope to argue that if we don’t allow the NSA to log our calls and finger our metadata, another 9/11 might encourage us to cede our civil liberties even worse. It is a pretty convoluted slope—call it the slippery water slide. Friedman’s essential claim is that, while this recently-revealed infringement on our privacy is bad, it does not have so significant an impact on our civil liberties as the theoretical laws a frightened populace might accept in the aftermath of another theoretical 9/11. Then we’d really be in trouble.