As we have become safer, we have, in that very human way, increasingly begrudged the means of our safety. The intellectual and political pendulum has swung against national-security agencies—indeed, against the basic requirements of an effective executive branch, which are the same today as when Alexander Hamilton outlined them in “Federalist No. 70” in 1788: “decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch.” Self-described reformers insist that the present-day U.S. government suffers from too much of these four elements. Since the 1970s, they have achieved great success in shifting government to be less decisive, less active, less secretive, and less able to move quickly—and not only in the domain of national security.

But the implications for national security are especially disturbing. In a world where danger comes as often from substate actors as from competing national governments, democratic governments need more and wider sources of information than before. Of course, the attainment of that information must be governed by law. If the National Security Agency breaks laws, corrective action is called for. But it’s not illegal, according to the most relevant Supreme Court precedent, for U.S. intelligence agencies to collect information on who connects to whom, provided they do not read the contents of messages without securing a warrant first. It’s certainly not illegal for agencies to intercept—and read—messages transmitted outside the United States. Herbert Hoover’s Secretary of State Henry Stimson famously closed the Cipher Bureau on the grounds that “gentlemen do not read other gentlemen’s mail.” Yet as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of war, Stimson would read decrypted communications with avidity.

We live in a world of predators. A democratic state too gentlemanly to learn all it can about potential threats is a state that has betrayed its most-fundamental responsibilities to the people it exists to safeguard.