When it comes to issues of privacy, the only important consideration to most people is trust. If I trust you, I am not worried about what private topics are shared with you. If I don't trust you, nothing private will be shared.

When listening to today's debate over the NSA PRISM program, ordering Verizon, and possibly others, to hand over all the telephone records of it's subscribers to the government one can get a very creepy feeling. Not so much that the government or even internet companies are viewing your private activity, but that it was all purposely kept secret.

You can debate if anything private is really being divulged, only meta-data really. And, with the pace of technological innovation and open communication over the internet, is anything really private anymore - - get used to it. Or, because it is post Boston Marathon bombing and to be used to fight the War on Terror, well, then, that's okay, right? But didn't President Obama just say the War on Terror is over?

When President Bush and Congress instituted the Patriot Act of 2001, there was a prolonged uproar over privacy. The act, a response to the September 11th terrorist attacks, significantly weakened restrictions on law enforcement agencies' gathering of intelligence; expanded the Secretary of the Treasury’s authority to regulate financial transactions; and broadened the discretion of law enforcement and immigration authorities in detaining and deporting immigrants suspected of terrorism-related acts. To hear the leftist uproar you would have thought that this act was an attempt by President Bush to control the American citizenry, ala Nazi Germany. The right looked at it as a necessary step to fight terrorism and if you weren't doing anything wrong, you had nothing to worry about. All very public, no secrets.

You hear the same debate today around the NSA/Verizon privacy breach of the Obama administration coming from opposite camps - the left says "nothing to see hear", "a necessary effort to thwart terrorism like the Patriot Act" and the right is concerned about loss of privacy and Nazi tactics. Other than political ideology, why would the two sides reverse positions on basically the same issue 12 years later?

The answer is trust. The left did not trust George Bush. The right does not trust Barack Obama. That is it, plain and simple. You can talk all day and the final root cause is trust.

So how do we build and maintain trust in politics? That is a subject for another article, but just to name a recent pair of Presidents, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton knew how. Against continuous, aggressive attacks from political enemies, neither President's Bush nor Obama could.

So what do we do when it becomes necessary to debate privacy in this country? We must fall back as always on the Constitution to protect our liberties. The definition is there. We elect people to represent us who revere the document and the intent of the founding of the country. We allow those people to establish laws to protect those liberties and we TRUST, that ethical people will obey the Constitution even without the fear of breaking laws.

But we are not naive. We know that not everyone is ethical and some will purposely breach the intent of the Constitution and break those laws to achieve a political or personal advantage. When they do, and the deed is exposed, as the NSA/Verizon scandal is now, the perpetrators must be dealt with firmly. Any breach of trust cannot stand. The Patriot Act was public and everyone knew the details of what and how your privacy was at risk and for what reasons. The NSA program was a secret, by design. If something is secret by design, and not announced as such, like "we can't tell you about this for national security reasons", then it should be suspect because it is kept secret for a reason. And when you add this scandal to Fast & Furious, Benghazi, IRS, AP, HHS and others, a frightening pattern of abuse of trust begins to appear.

One mistake after another and the trust "eraser" eliminates even the conviction of the most ardent supporters. That is why not trusting the Obama Administration on this privacy issue makes sense, and it should be pursued to its appropriate conclusion to discover who and why. Once who and why are uncovered, a decision can be made, under the law, on what punishment is required for people who betray our trust.