I am sure that the same rationalizations were made by people who got carted away to concentration camps and gulags, or just plain shot in the back of the head.
Laws? As an attorney, I understand very well how they are made, the theory behind them, how they should be enforced, etc. But as a human being who had a great grandfather murdered by the NKVD (when in his mid-70s and suffering from cancer, no less), and who had over 70 distant relatives murdered by Hitler’s thugs and their collaborators, I know that laws intended to protect rights only mean something if those with the power to enforce those laws decide that it is in their interest to do so; otherwise, they are tools of deception that are used against the complacent.
Besides, even paranoids have enemies. :>)
The last five years have reinforced one critical lesson for me:
Laws are made for those who follow them. Those who have no intention of following them and are privileged enough to not follow them because there are no ramifications of doing so, will break laws with impunity.
And do so.
There are reams of rules, regulations, guidelines, laws, penalties, and everything else under the sun relating to the PATRIOT Act and FISA warrants to protect us as American citizens from our own government’s actions.
And those who didn’t see fit to obey those laws simply...didn’t. They walked over them, around them, and through them. And nothing was done to any of them.
We live in a Constitutional Republic which means that instead of being ruled by men or by a monarch or tyrant, we are ruled by law. And those laws are now ignored.
Which means we no longer live in a Constitutional Republic.