I do not believe the US Government is a giant conspiracy to evade the constitution for the purpose of apprehending drug users. I believe that when the government seeks a warrant to surveil foreign targets for counterterrorism, their interests are actually in disrupting terrorism.
That doesn't mean I think we have effective counterterrorism (for instance, there's widespread evidence that CIA uses, or at least for a long time used, torture to attempt to obtain information in counterterrorism cases; torture is morally repellent and, equally importantly, demonstrably counterproductive), or that I think terrorism is legitimately the key federal goal that DHS and CIA claim that it is.
But I don't subscribe to the slippery slope argument that suggests that the government will inevitably use every power we give it for any purpose to, I don't know, enforce the Comics Code Authority.
That doesn't mean I think we have effective counterterrorism (for instance, there's widespread evidence that CIA uses, or at least for a long time used, torture to attempt to obtain information in counterterrorism cases; torture is morally repellent and, equally importantly, demonstrably counterproductive), or that I think terrorism is legitimately the key federal goal that DHS and CIA claim that it is.
But I don't subscribe to the slippery slope argument that suggests that the government will inevitably use every power we give it for any purpose to, I don't know, enforce the Comics Code Authority.