Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Posted [1]: Jul 31, 2006

Under the headline, "U.S. learns to live with less freedom," a recent article in the Toronto Star focuses on how the political atmosphere has changed in Manchester, N.H., a place ordinarily considered to be fairly libertarian in its outlook.

"The fierce cultural aversion to the long reach of government is emblazoned on every license plate here," writes Toronto Star reporter Tim Harper. " 'Live Free or Die' is not just a cheesy license plate slogan in this tiny New England state. But even New Hampshire is not immune to the national erosion of civil liberties that has permeated every part of the United States since terrorists forced their way into airline cockpits almost five years ago, taking away a nation's bravado and replacing it with fear."

Citing surveillance programs put in place by the Bush administration, Harper points to a growing dissimilarity between the United States and Canada: "In Canada, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service must get court approval before conducting any electronic surveillance, and the Communications Security Establishment needs written authorization from the minister of defense. Here, Bush argued his constitutional power overrode the need to go to a court that took too long to give approval anyway."

In his State of the Union address on Jan. 29, 2002, President Bush declared that "America is embracing a new ethic and a new creed: 'Let's roll.' " Along with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, this new rolling has activated a broad expansion of domestic and international surveillance and monitoring by the federal government, without warrants or significant congressional oversight in many cases, in order to acquire the records of telephone companies, banks and other businesses.

When these new spying programs have been challenged in court as unconstitutional, lawyers for the Bush administration have argued that the cases should be dismissed because any hearing of the information involved would directly endanger national security by exposing state secrets.

Following the revelation that the U.S. Treasury and Central Intelligence Agency had been secretly monitoring for five years the financial records of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, a Brussels-based consortium that handles millions of messages per day from thousands of financial institutions around the world, then-Treasury Secretary John Snow defended the surreptitious monitoring as "government at its best."

For those who might want to dissent in public to any of the above, we now have "designated free speech zones," an Orwellian policy that permits American citizens to employ their First Amendment rights in chain-link cages.

For those classified as vaguely defined "enemy combatants," due process has been replaced by incarceration in perpetuity with little or no contact with legal counsel. "The administration's handling of the enemy combatant cases," contends Stuart Taylor, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution specializing in constitutional and international law, "has been so lawless as to smack of tyranny."

With elections, thanks to the Bipartisan Reform Act, otherwise know as McCain-Feingold, a new era of regulations places restrictions on political activism, free speech, and citizens' political participation by means of a de facto ban of most issue ads on radio and television during election seasons.

The act places limitations on issue ads within 30 days of a primary election and 60 days of a general election. The impact, as stated succinctly by writer James Bovard, a policy adviser to The Future of Freedom Foundation: "Groups can now criticize members of Congress only during times when most voters are not paying attention."

In June, the Supreme Court ruled that authorities can use evidence collected even if police failed to knock before entering a home. Radley Balko, a Cato Institute policy analyst, citing the problem of "a disturbingly long list of completely innocent people who've been killed in 'wrong door' raids," warns that "we can now expect to see an even more pronounced increase in the use of illegal, military-style no-knock raids," tactics "more appropriate for the battlefield than the living room."

The state's underlying assumption in all of the above is the idea that we'll be safer and more secure if the government is bigger and more aggressive.

That's not exactly what the Founding Fathers had in mind. The motto on the title page of "An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania," published in 1759, attributed to Benjamin Franklin: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."