Trust and surveillance

Our polling director Gary Langer blogs about what recent nationwide polls reveal:

Lawyers and journalists tend to see rights as absolute. Rightly or wrongly, the public tends to see more flexibility – a give-and-take among competing rights. Many people will tolerate intrusions on civil rights when it’s seen as necessary to protect other more pressing rights, e.g., the (perceived) right to security. Toleration of these intrusions is based on both a belief that the threat is great enough to make them necessary, and trust in the government to make them as limited and targeted as possible.

The administration is on some shaky ground right now because its trust level is low. In March the public divided on whether, as it investigates terrorism, it’s doing enough to protect the rights of American citizens – 46 percent said yes, but 51 percent said no. (In January, three in 10 said the government was making unjustified intrusions on privacy – far from most, but double what it was in 2003.) Nonetheless, also in January, the public said by 2-1 that investigating terrorism remained more important than avoiding intrusions on personal privacy.

Similarly, in March, 62 percent of Americans supported extending Patriot Act provisions giving the FBI “additional authority in areas like surveillance, wiretaps and obtaining records in terrorism investigations,” even when we noted that “opponents said it went too far in compromising privacy rights.” And in the same poll, 54 percent called the NSA wiretap program an "acceptable" way for the government to investigate terrorism.

UPDATE 05/12/06: ABC News/Washington Post poll: Phone-Records Surveillance Is Broadly Acceptable to Public