Describing Bob Litt in Contradictory Terms?

In his profile yesterday of DNI General Counsel Bob Litt, the Washington Post's Greg Miller writes:

Litt has donated tens of thousands of dollars to Democratic candidates and causes, and friends describe him in somewhat contradictory terms: an avowed liberal on social issues but a true believer in the propriety of surveillance programs such as those exposed by Snowden.

Perhaps because my political sensibility is not terribly far from Litt's (though I'm certainly not a partisan Democrat) I was a little taken aback by that sentence.Why is there any contradiction between being a liberal on social issues---or, for that matter, on matters of economic policy---and believing in strong signals intelligence programs? Surely there is no great philosophical linkage between relatively active government in areas like the provision of services to the poor and relatively passive or limited government in areas like the provision of security. But I don't even see much philosophical linkage between civil libertarianism on social issues like abortion and gay marriage, on the one hand, and opposition to foreign intelligence activity, on the other. I suppose they can both be seen as advocacy of smaller government, but that's hardly the clarion call of the "avowed liberal." I certainly don't speak for Litt, but as someone who at once supports liberal social welfare programs, has left-leaning views of contested social issues, and believes in robust intelligence authorities, let me offer the following to resolve Miller's sense of a contradiction in Litt's attitudes: One has to be alive to enjoy one's civil liberties or to benefit from liberal social programs. I believe in a strong government capable of providing significant social services to those who need them and capable of protecting its population sufficiently that people have the benefit of those programs and the ability to otherwise exercise capacious liberties in safety from external threat and internal crime.