I'll tell you why I agree on both counts.

Why do I doubt Romney was treated unfairly? Because I doubt Obama would have dared order it, and because the prospect of a Romney victory didn't threaten either the NSA nor a contractor like Booz Allen Hamilton nor the national-security state generally. There was reason to believe he'd have been friendlier to them than Obama!

The scenario I worry about most isn't actually another Richard Nixon type in the Oval Office, though that could certainly happen. What I worry about actually more closely resembles Mark Felt, the retired FBI agent exposed 32 years after Watergate as Deep Throat **—that is, I worry more about people high up inside the national-security state using their insider knowledge to help take down a politician. Is part of the deference they enjoy due to politicians worrying about that too?

Imagine a very plausible 2016 presidential contest in which an anti-NSA candidate is threatening to win the nomination of one party or the other—say that Ron Wyden is challenging Hillary Clinton, or that Rand Paul might beat Chris Christie. Does anyone doubt where Keith Alexander or his successor as NSA director would stand in that race? Or in a general election where an anti-NSA candidate might win?

What would an Alexander type do if he thought the victory of one candidate would significantly rein in the NSA with catastrophic effects on national security? Would he really do nothing to prevent their victory?

I don't know. But surely there is some plausible head of the NSA who'd be tempted to use his position to sink the political prospects of candidates antagonistic to the agency's interests. And we needn't imagine something so risky and unthinkable as direct blackmail.

Surveillance-state defenders will want to jump in here and insist that there are already internal safeguards and congressional oversight to prevent the abuses I am imagining. But I don't buy it. It isn't just that I can't help but think Alexander could find a way to dig up dirt on politicians if he wanted to without it ever getting out to overseers or the public.

Forget about Alexander. Let's think about someone much lower in the surveillance state hierarchy: Edward Snowden. As we know, Snowden broke protocol and violated his promise to keep classified information secret because his conscience demanded it: He believed that he was acting for the greater good; his critics have called him a narcissist for taking it upon himself to violate rules and laws he'd agreed to obey.

It isn't hard to imagine an alternative world in which the man in Snowden's position was bent not on reforming the NSA, but on thwarting its reformers—that he was willing to break the law in service of the surveillance state, fully believing that he was acting in the best interests of the American people.