"Sacrifice Liberty for Security? Not Without a Fight!"

Three cheers to Jay Bookman writing in the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Here's more than a snippet but (as always) I encourage you to read the rest:

This is supposed to be America, the land of the free and the home of the brave.

But I'm beginning to have my doubts, about the free part and the brave part, too.

This America, this increasingly strange America, is looking more and more like the land of the cowed and the home of the silent.

In this America, we have a military agency, the National Security Agency, secretly tracking and analyzing every phone call or e-mail that is sent or received by hundreds of millions of American citizens, with records of all of those calls retained forever.

And in this America, millions and millions of people profess to be quite comfortable living under a government that wants to know who every one of us is talking to, and has the technology to realize that ambition.

It will keep us safe, some Americans have responded. Only those with something to hide should be worried, others have said.

But then again, we all have something to hide, don't we? My something may be different than your something, but we all have something we would rather keep to ourselves — the things we read or watch, the things we do or think or buy, the people we talk with or the Web sites we visit. . . .

Admittedly, there is a reason for that willingness to let government vastly expand its oversight of our lives, and that reason is fear of terrorism.

But there is always a reason, isn't there? There is always some threat to security that is said to justify the surrender of liberty to government. In every nation that has ever lost freedom to government, there has always been a reason.

There was a reason that the soldiers of King George III burst into the homes of colonial Americans without warrants or reasonable cause. And back then, there were also those who saw nothing wrong with that practice, who believed that only those who had done something wrong had anything to fear.

Fortunately, our Founding Fathers thought otherwise, enshrining that belief in the Bill of Rights to guarantee that "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated."

In Stalin's Soviet Union, they had a reason for government monitoring — fear of capitalist imperialists. In today's China and North Korea, they have a reason as well. In George Orwell's "1984," the reason was the threat from Eastasia or Eurasia.

"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment," Orwell wrote. "How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time."

But a strong people, a free people intent on remaining free, does not accept those reasons as sufficient. They are willing to accept the danger as the price of their liberty.