“We came up with the Internet,” Donald Trump said about halfway through his much-mocked cybersecurity answer at Monday’s presidential debate, and his brief channeling of Al Gore wasn’t even the worst of it.

“I think Secretary Clinton and myself would agree very much, when you look at what [the Islamic State] is doing with the Internet, they’re beating us at our own game,” he continued. “So we have to get very, very tough on cyber and cyber warfare. It is a huge problem. I have a son. He’s 10 years old. He has computers. He is so good with these computers, it’s unbelievable. The security aspect of cyber is very, very tough. And maybe it’s hardly doable. But I will say, we are not doing the job we should be doing.”

I’ll refrain from going after the low-hanging fruit here, because if we get distracted by Trump’s technological ignorance, bizarre boasting, and general incoherence, we’ll miss his basic point. He’s right that he and Hillary Clinton “agree very much” on something.

For both of them, the big concern in cybersecurity is just that: security. A far lesser consideration (I doubt it’s much of a consideration at all) is the question of liberty and the rule of law.

In their rush to promise that they and they alone can keep us safe, both Clinton and Trump are ready to trample the Constitution. Neither cares about privacy and the Fourth Amendment. Neither seems to have any regard for the First Amendment either.

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The emphasis is on getting “very, very tough” (Trump) and doing “much more with our tech companies to prevent ISIS and their operatives from being able to use the Internet to radicalize…people” (Clinton) — both of which sound pretty good in debate-stage vagaries but in practice mean an even more invasive extension of the federal government’s ability to snoop and censor online.

Of course, we didn’t need this debate to tell us these two candidates are hostile to liberty on all things Internet.

Back in 2013, Trump suggested that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden should be executed for the “crime” of telling the American people their government is illegally and immorally spying on us by the million. And this past December, Trump explicitly said he “tend[s] to err on the side of security” over privacy and liberty, which is a euphemism for letting the government do whatever it wants so long as it promises the impossible payoff of absolute safety.

Clinton’s record is hardly better. True, she hasn’t outright called for Snowden’s execution, but she has lied about what he did and said he should be in prison. Like Trump, Clinton is a vigorous supporter of the unconstitutional (and wildly misnamed) Patriot Act that led to the violation of so many Americans’ rights. She bragged just a year ago about voting to re-up the Patriot Act when she was in the Senate, claiming it is “necessary” for Washington to poke its nose in all our business.

In the present political climate, this security-focused argument is an easy way to win points. After all, it seems like every week there’s a new homegrown attacker, someone inspired by the insanity of ISIS to wreak havoc in Florida, or New York, or a Macy’s in Washington State, or wherever the next murderer happens to strike. In that context, it’s understandable that fear would push us towards the strong arm offered by a Clinton or Trump.

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But it’s also a massive mistake. As Andrew Napolitano, a constitutional scholar and former judge, argued in the wake of the most recent round of attacks, “it is in times of fear [that] we need to be most vigilant about protecting our liberties.” They are what really keep us secure.

“I make this argument,” Napolitano continued, “because when people are afraid, it is human nature for them to accept curtailment of their liberties — whether it be speech or travel or privacy or due process — if they become convinced that the curtailment will keep them safe. But these liberties are natural rights, integral to all rational people and not subject to the government’s whim.”

We cannot let the next president make policy based on fear and at the expense of these vital individual rights. That holds true no matter who wins this abominable election — even if 10-year-old Barron Trump is as good at computers as I hear.

Why are there two major political parties in the U.S.?