"Give Me Liberty" now a distant & fondly-remembered phrase

Dan Gillmor, always with an eye to the tech industry, discusses our ever-shrinking cache of liberties:

Personal liberty has suffered under Bush's administration By Dan Gillmor - Mercury News Technology Columnist If you believe that political and social liberty go hand in hand with economic freedom -- and that they form an underpinning of a vibrant free market -- you should be worried about another four years like the four we've just had. Let's grant that George W. Bush plainly believes in a free market, largely unconstrained by government intervention. But he has made it clear that he doesn't have the same devotion to other kinds of liberty. He and his allies have used terrorism to launch a massive assault on civil liberties. They are not just indifferent to liberty, they are actively hostile to it. Bush's first term has been a catalog of encroachments. He has expanded surveillance -- electronic and otherwise -- without adequate safeguards. He has had a mania for secrecy, shielding more and more government information from public view. This amounts to telling Americans they have no right in many cases to know how our money is being used or what government is doing in our names. This president has curbed dissent through intimidation. His attorney general practically labeled as traitors people who questioned the outrageously named ``Patriot Act,'' for example. More recently, the Bush forces have excluded anyone who is not a declared supporter from being even in the vicinity of campaign events, and have even fenced off protesters in Orwellian ``free speech zones'' far from the scenes. The Bush years have emboldened rights and privacy invaders everywhere. A national ID card is making a back-door entrance via a scheme by the state agencies that issue driver's licenses, for example. He has given corporate interests carte blanche to buy, sell, massage and trade our most personal information -- mocking his vows in the 2000 campaign to be a president who would protect privacy. The federal government now encourages (and buys) all kinds of data collection and ways to manipulate it, and offers barely a hint of safeguards. Do you imagine for even a second that the radio-chip ID implants being sold to track patients inside hospitals won't be used for much broader kinds of surveillance someday? Ditto the radio tags the government says it wants to put into our passports (and soon, no doubt, our driver's licenses). Surveillance is big business now. Insidiously, the Bush administration has turned the corporate data mongers into partners in the dawning surveillance state. Evading even the most trivial safeguards, including federal laws protecting privacy, it buys or uses data collected by private companies that are under no such restrictions. An intrusive airline passenger screening system, relying on commercial data and other information, was officially scrapped after protests. But as the Washington Post reported earlier this month, one of the former government officials behind that project has launched a private company that will collect and provide data for the project's new incarnation -- and established the company offshore in Bermuda, ``outside the reach of U.S. regulators.'' The most frightening assault on liberty has had nothing to do with the Patriot Act, surveillance or privacy. Bush has systematically ignored the law when it suited his purpose, treating the Constitution as a suggestion box, not the bedrock of liberty. He asserted the right to declare American citizens as enemy combatants here at home and to jail them indefinitely, with no right even to see a lawyer. The Supreme Court, thankfully, rejected Bush's dictatorial views in two pivotal decisions earlier this year. But presidents nominate justices, and this one means to nominate the kind who will let the government do pretty much what it pleases. Early last week, William Rehnquist, chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, had surgery for thyroid cancer. His condition reminded people that whoever is president during the next four years will probably nominate three or four justices to the highest court. A court with two, three or four judges of Bush's preference would not be friendly, on balance, to our rights as individuals. The president has made clear his intention to appoint judges who would overturn abortion rights. That, too, is a question of liberty. Is John Kerry any better? He voted for the ``Patriot'' law, after all. But while Bush vows to expand that law's reach over our lives, Kerry has said he would work to repeal some of the more odious provisions, such as the one that lets government agents rifle through our lives -- including what library books we read -- with few safeguards. I believe that a free economy rests in large part on people's willingness to feel free -- to take chances, to be different from others. The surveillance state is a conformist state, where a fog of fear deadens initiative and the willingness to take risks. No sane person wants to make law enforcement impotent. But risk is part of a free culture, and the more we clamp down on things that have any element of risk the more we clamp down on freedom itself.