The Post reports that citizens’ concern for privacy is yawning and blinking after a long hibernation: Two-thirds think intelligence agencies are “intruding on some Americans’ privacy rights” in terrorism investigations, and the number who say this is justified has fallen from 63 percent to 51 percent over three years. Better still, a majority want to see hearings into the administration’s use of surveillance tactics. And the least privacy-friendly views seem to emerge in response to the most meaningless question:

Nearly two-thirds rank investigating threats as more important than guarding against intrusions on personal privacy, down from 79 percent in 2002.

What does that even mean? Along what margin? You could decide you’re going to guard privacy so jealously that you can never investigate anyone until they stand in the town square shrieking about their intention to bomb a building for the glory of Osama bin Laden. And that would be moronic. Or (if we had the manpower) you could tap everyone’s phone, all the time, in hopes of catching a terrorist randomly. Since nobody actually supports doing either of these things, everybody is willing to rank either privacy or security as the decisive consideration in some contexts. What varies is the degree of intrusion people will countenance for a given increase in the probability of foiling an attack.

Strictly speaking, I think people ought to regard a question about which is “more important” as just unintelligible. What I bet they do instead is think about how bad having your privacy invaded is, then think about how bad a plane full of people crashing into a skyscraper full of people in an enormous fireball is. They then conclude the latter seems worse. And this is true, but tells us nothing very helpful about how to strike the right balance.