[Mickydtron]

I was also overall impressed with the tone of the article. However, there were a few phrases which somewhat worried me. Specifically, "there is a broad recognition on both sides of the Atlantic that we live in dangerous times" and "if governments are going to prevent and investigate threats to public safety in the real world, they need timely and appropriate access to data that is stored online".

The first is somewhat debatable (there obviously is danger, but more or less than there used to be?), and even if completely true, "dangerous times" have been used to justify a lot of very bad things, so nebulous references worry me.

The second is also a sentence that by itself is fairly straightforward and uncontroversial, but is highly dependent on "timely" and "appropriate". After all, if "timely" means "as soon as we need/want it", and "appropriate" means "we swear we won't look at it unless we need to, honest", then many NSA programs could be loosely described as a way to get "timely and appropriate access to data that is stored online".

It is possible that neither of these sentences is meant to weasel in these sorts of meanings, and that I'm simply reacting to anti-privacy advocates having used otherwise innocuous phrases to justify bad behavior.