From ABC News:

Asked by Tapper how Obama could be so sure that certain controversial domestic anti-terrorism policies instituted by the Bush administration were not instrumental to the protection of U.S. citizens, Obama said that he did not necessarily oppose all the efforts, but “it is my firm belief that we can track terrorists, we can crack down on threats against the United States, but we can do so within the constraints of our Constitution.”

This is in the context of the recent Supreme Court holding that if you’re going to spirit people away to a military prison camp for years on end—people often picked up far from a battlefield and locked up on the basis of hearsay—you can’t just stamp “enemy combatant” on their foreheads; you actually have to afford them some kind of meaningful due process. What bothers me about this question is that it gets the burden backwards: If you want to do away with the most basic sort of restraint on the government’s power to arbitrarily deprive people of liberty, even when those people are not citizens, then the onus is on you to give a really, really compelling explanation of why this is unambiguously necessary to prevent massive harms.