Roger Pilon, the libertarian Cato Institute’s vice president for legal affairs and director of its Center for Constitutional Studies, has angered many over the years in the intellectual world of free minds and free markets by endorsing the war on terror’s intelligence-gathering policies. He’s done it again by co-authoring an op-ed with Richard Epstein, an adjunct Cato scholar, defending the National Security Agency’s surveillance policy.
This is not a position that most libertarians hold, to put it mildly. Another Cato scholar, research fellow Julian Sanchez, has written an essay today specifically taking issue with their op-ed. Sanchez did it in part to refute any claim that Pilon and Epstein’s column represented the official Cato Institute stance, he says.
The Pilon and Epstein op-ed, which ran in the Chicago Tribune last week, argues:
The authors approvingly cite President Obama’s claim that we cannot have 100 percent security and 100 percent privacy. “[T]he process involves some necessary loss of privacy. But it’s trivial,” they argue.
In a post on the Cato Institute’s official blog on Monday, Sanchez offers a point-by-point rebuttal arguing that the authors are mistaken about the particulars of the surveillance laws and the NSA’s policies.
He concludes:
