Decius:

Our authorization is obviously not required.

Dan Geer:

Things that need no appropriations are outside the system of checks and balances.

Decius:

The police and the military are increasingly tribes of their own, separate from the rest of us ...

Rustin Cohle:

Of course I'm dangerous. I'm police. I can do terrible things to people with impunity.

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

When the police brutalize people, we are forgiving because ultimately we are really just forgiving ourselves. Power, decoupled from responsibility, is what we seek. The citizen who needs to look away generally finds a reason.

Rustin Cohle:

People incapable of guilt usually do have a good time.

David Cole:

These programs are best understood not as unique to Obama or Bush, or even the United States, but as reflections of how the world is changing in ways that threaten not only fundamental human rights to life and privacy, but the essence of democracy itself. As such, they raise questions that will not go away under this president or the next, but that will with increasing urgency confront nations around the world.

James Comey and Robert Hannigan have ... called for public debate on terrorism and technology. It is disappointing, if not surprising, that they see a need for public debate only when new technologies may impair their ability to monitor us, and not when such technologies enhance their monitoring.

James Fallows:

As a country, America has been at war nonstop for the past 13 years. As a public, it has not. What happens to all institutions that escape serious external scrutiny and engagement has happened to our military. For democracies, messy debates are less damaging in the long run than letting important functions run on autopilot, as our military essentially does now.

Rory Stewart:

Nothing is ultimately more damaging to the military than absence of criticism.

Charles J. Dunlap Jr., a retired Air Force major general who now teaches at Duke law school:

It's becoming increasingly tribal, in the sense that more and more people in the military are coming from smaller and smaller groups. It's become a family tradition, in a way that's at odds with how we want to think a democracy spreads the burden.