[tene]

I understand that you're not personally advocating for this position, but I'm glad you brought it up, because I really resent this kind of "Here's an imaginable scenario where this would have some negative consequence" argument.

Yes, if the regulators stop doing their job well, and there's a sudden extreme emergency requiring some kind of action that regulators have not already approved for use in emergencies, then there will be some costs, and sometimes those costs can be measured in lives.

This is true, but all it says is "there is some nonzero chance of society paying some nonzero cost". These costs are what we are paying in order to have a well-regulated intelligence service. The bet is that the expected risk from an effectively-unregulated intelligence service has worse costs for society than one with effective regulation.

In order for "think about the children" to be a meaningful argument, you need to actually establish that the nightmare scenario is meaningfully more likely than overreach and abuse of power that causes similar or worse costs for society.

Has this kind of "We could save the children if only we could get regulator approval to tap this phone line! Unfortunately, the regulator is taking a nap, so we're forced to let the children die." scenario actually been happening? If so, is there any kind of much-more-specific permissions that could be granted by the regulators to address the actual emergencies that have been coming up?

I kind of get "You can't trade off a life!" for some kinds of arguments, but we're talking about national security issues, and failures of corruption and overreach also involve risking lives.

"We need to just drop all safeguards and trust our valiant heroes" only works if the people who are subject to regulations actually are pretty reliably valiant heroes, or there are other significant incentive and oversight mechanisms to rely on. I don't have personal experience with people who work in national intelligence and security, but I haven't ever heard anyone willing to say that people in this line of work are consistently virtuous and corruption-resistant. There are good individuals, certainly, but there really are also both selfish individuals, and well-intentioned-but-misinformed individuals who can do a lot of damage.