dallas702 said:
... I am so sick of hearing that Ben Franklin quote about giving up liberty and security. I choose to be alive, and I choose to keep my family and other American families alive. I gave up a big part of my adult life to ensure that...even if it meant bending a liberal view of unlimited privacy "rights". All the liberty in the universe is nothing when you are blown to pieces.
I disagree. I'd rather die than live under an imperialist, autocratic regime (I'm not saying that we are there now -- but we could get there, that whole slippery slope). Blow me up and my family up if you have to, if it would prevent our government from installing camera's in my house, my bedroom, and trying to regulate my thoughts. If I lived in Cuba, I'd sure as heck take up arms against Castro. And if I lived in Iraq prior to our dealing with the situation there, I'd take up arms against Saddam. There are things worth fighting for and dying for, and freedom is among them.
I am a libertarian at heart, for less regulation, for less government. I do not mind the government checking security at airports, or going through x-rays when I walk into a federal court house, or even a public stadium. We need to take precautions.
You start listening in on my telephone calls, particulary those to my wife or my family, and we are gonna have some serious problems. You evesdrop on my e-mails, to intercept attorney-client communications for the purpose of gathering evidence to help prove a crime that my clients may have committed, and we are going to have serious problems.
You try to implant chips on my body to track my movements, or my voting patterns to make sure I vote along the party line, or install microphones or cameras in or around my house because we should keep tabs on all American citizens, or you try to remove my ability to own a firearm so that you can further subjugate the American citizenry, and I will take up arms against the government because it is in violation of the constitution and must be overthrown.
This is not because the government would discover any wrongdoing, quite the contrary, but because I have the right to live free, curtailed only by the requirement not to do harm to others.
A little extreme for today's time, I admit. Fortunately for us, a group of men in the 1770's had similar notions to my own and acted upon them. And fortunately, to date, the U.S. Supreme Court has not abdicated its role in protecting the American citizenry against unchecked executive power, nor does it seem likely to do so in the future.
I recognize that freedom is not absolute, but there are limits to what the government can and should do.
And I have spent the better part of my life supporting and defending the constitution. It embodies an idea that goes beyond personal safety, although it envisions personal safety. It is, at its core, a declaration of fundamental freedoms and checks on absolute government, in the hopes of fostering a country of free thinking, freedom loving people. When we move away from that, towards something else because people are afraid of, in this case terrorists, they win and we lose... our freedom.
