Jacob Hornberger on Security and the Right to Liberty:
As everyone knows, the federal government has seized upon the September 11 terrorist attacks to expand its power to harass and spy on both immigrants and American citizens. “We must give up some liberty to protect our security,” government supporters often cry in an attempt to justify the federal expansion of power over our lives.
Must liberty be sacrificed or compromised in order to achieve security? Not at all!
A major legitimate purpose of government is to investigate violent crime and bring the wrongdoer to justice. Consider, for example, laws against murder. Most of us would contend that the state should criminalize the wrongful taking of another person’s life, because that conduct involves the coercive interference with another person’s right to live his life.
Thus, when a murder is committed, we want the police to investigate, find the person who committed the crime, and prosecute him for murder.
What we don’t want, however, is for the police to use the murder as an opportunity to begin harassing and spying on everyone in the community in order to ferret out the wrongdoer or in order to prevent others from committing such crimes in the future.
What Jacob says is true, unless, of course, you happen to be a statist apologist who finds great joy in the current orgy of government expansion of the police state. In that case, you are miserable excuse for a human being and better suited to a life of empowering bureaucratic murder in a totalitarian regime like China or North Korea. Either way, you're not a supporter of the Constitution and as such, I view the actions of those in your clique as un-American.
Contrary to the relentless mantra of those finally frightened into consciousness on the right and left, there is no such thing as balancing civil liberties with security needs. The possibility of foreign terrorist strikes on American soil didn't magically come to be on September 11, 2001. Such attacks had long been a possibility, regardless of what those who are claiming "everything changed" would have us think. The CIA and FBI had been foiling terrorism attempts by Al Qaeda and other such organizations for many years, without needing to institute such Constitutionally disrespectful measures as the PATRIOT Act and related regulatory infringements. Quite simply, the success of one of these terrorist operations was only a matter of time. Nothing short of a a cop in front of every building and our military lined up asshole to bellybutton along our borders is going to change that. In other words, if someone wants to hurt us badly enough they are likely to find a way to succeed no matter how many PATRIOT Acts we are able to tolerate. What we can do is continue to foil as many attempts as possible while leaving the concepts we are protecting intact. The passage of the PATRIOT Act may have been successful to a certain extent in easing the fears of a scared and ignorant populace. Unfortunately, that easing of fear comes with a terrible price tagtag – a false sense of security. People are now convinced that if they sacrifice enough freedom, that somehow, we'll eventually be secure.
As it is, these overreaching measures are nothing more than mad power grabs by law enforcement and those in government seeking to further whet their fascist tendencies. The worst part is, they know it. Nothing in the PATRIOT Act would have prevented the tragedies of 2001 and the Justice Department alluded to that fact previously. The only folks who don't get it are those who were brutally shaken awake on that horrible day. I understand fear and the desire to be protected. What I don't understand is what those folks figure we'll be protecting once we've traded away our liberties for a false sense of security. Without our freedom, there is no need for security.
Without our civil liberties, would America still stand? Sure she would. But without our most basic freedoms the very idea of America will die, leaving behind the corroded hulk of what once was the greatest experiment on Earth. What would be the point?