May 30, 2015–Here it is, about thirty-six hours and counting until the legal authority for several Big Brother eavesdropping activities evaporates, and now President Obama joins the fray. Does he, constitutional lawyer that he is, stand against such draconian measures, surveillance that violates the Fourth Amendment and chills the First? Does he follow the lines of the surveillance reforms he offered in a speech in January 2014? No, and yes.

I’ve written in this space before about Mr. Obama going out on a limb with his senior spooks, drinking their Kool-Aid on warrantless eavesdropping and collection against all citizens which has never yet stopped a real terrorist action. I also wrote, after the January 2014 speech, that Obama’s reforms were mostly designed to make the surveillance palatable to Americans. Here Mr. Obama has simply lined up with the security hacks–and they have become hacks–now lacking imagination or creativity, relying excessively on old ways simply because they are familiar. The hacks are throwing a tantrum (see “Toddler’s Grandfather: NSA’s Terrible Twos Tantrum,” May 25, 2015). Barack is joining them.

What the president said yesterday bears quotation: “Heaven forbid we’ve got a problem where we could have prevented a terrorist attack or apprehended someone who was engaged in dangerous activity, but we didn’t do so simply because of inaction in the Senate.” Unpack that language and you find that this is security for show, political cover. We should surveille all Americans using methods that have never been effective so that, after the next terrorist attack, we can say the bad guys could not have been apprehended with these methods ’cause we had that covered. (Of course, we can’t make that showing without the very kind of public investigation the spooks will fight tooth and nail, so what’s the point?)

Alternatively, Obama says we need this to “apprehend someone who was engaged in dangerous activity.” What is that? A door so big you can drive a truck through it. It was Ronald Reagan who said that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” and he was happy to paint black hats on those he didn’t like while pretending that vicious CIA-supported rebels–in fact the very islamist fundamentalist fighters whom we now consider the terrorist enemy– were echoes of our own Founding Fathers. “Dangerous activity” is in the eye of the beholder, and it is an invitation to even more arbitrary actions. Who’s to say what activity is dangerous? Security for show invites the arbitrary application of police power in ambiguous situations. Think of any of the police violence incidents we have been plagued now for months.

Sometimes Senate inaction can be a good thing. Let’s just let these harmful statutes expire. Write your senator and say so!