Telephone Doesn't Scare Me Anymore

Matthew Yglesias has a post on NSA data mining over at tpmcafe. It reminds me of a debate I heard about at nationals a long time ago.

The setup is that you are a good person about to be given superpowers, and your enemy will get whatever powers you accept. I've forgotten the precise question, but basically you want to figure out which powers to take.

It made for an insanely stupid debate round, but I think it's a very good question to ask when you're designing your government. When you grant the government authority to do something, you are unleashing potential for both good and evil. In a sense, you are creating a superhero and a supervillian with the same powers. I don't mean that some elected governments are good and others are evil, though that may be true. What I mean is that even within the same administration there will be impulses both to use power and to abuse it. We aren't looking for cartoonish villains in the administration (though I bet we could find a few in this one). We are trying to guard against the natural inclination to use the tools at hand to achieve personal or political ends.

In practice, of course, we have safeguards that limit the potential for wrongdoing while allowing the good projects to go forward. Those safeguards aren't perfect, though, which is why I think Matt's post is so smart. When a program has a very limited upside, but huge potential for abuse, it seems like the kind of power you would never want to accept, given that the villian will get the same power. Under superhero analysis, then, it's the kind of thing we don't want the government to be able to do (unless we really trust our safeguards).