These considerations are not an easy balance especially for those of us on the libertarian left.
"Out of power", says Sasha Abramsky, "a left that ignores the magnitude of these threats risks reducing itself to irrelevance, and, in so doing, ceding power to conservatives who will fight their wars on terror in a deeply destructive, dirty way, who will leap upon the opportunity to clamp down on civil liberties and undermine non military, non security-related government spending, and who will use the fear of terror to reshape societies according to their own illiberal sights."
As long as we condemn the Patriot Act while offering no specifics on how we would protect the liberal democracies of the world, the public will always pick the promise of saftey from the right over the criticisms and critiques of the left (libertarian or otherwise) that offer them nothing but vitriol and ill will.
-Ali Massoud