Is there a chance that this time we’ll escape that trap? One glimmer of hope lies in Washington’s nascent civil liberties caucus, an alliance of libertarian-leaning Republicans such as Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Justin Amash with ACLU-ish Democrats such as Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Jared Polis. If that informal coalition can hang together, it may be able to raise a transpartisan challenge to the national security state and its defenders in both big parties. And if—if—that conflict sets the narrative, scrambling the usual partisan lines, it will be harder to channel the current debates into yet another Red/Blue poo-throwing match.

But there would still be other barriers to serious change. The cross-party civil liberties alliance is small, after all, and Barack Obama is in a stronger political position today than Gerald Ford was in 1975. And even in the ’70s, the reforms that ultimately were enacted didn’t turn out to have many teeth. Just a decade after COINTELPRO was officially ended, the FBI was using some of the same old tactics against the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador: tapping their phones, intercepting their mail, possibly burglarizing their offices. Iran-contra itself made it clear that the post-Watergate probes didn’t end illicit operations abroad. And while a law was passed in 1978 to rein in the NSA, the body it created as a check on the agency—the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court—hasn’t exactly been a watchdog.