Freedom for safety: an old trade--and a useless one.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Privacy and freedom swapped for security and safety following September 11 terrorists attacks

AMID THE MAD, horrific carnage of 9/11--amid the planes screaming into office buildings and cornfields; amid the last-minute phone calls by doomed innocents to loved ones; amid the victims so desperate that they dove from the heights of the World Trade Center to the pavement below (what nightmare thoughts must have shot through their minds in that all too brief yet interminable fall to Ground Zero?); amid the billowing cloud of ash that smothered Manhattan and the rest of the country like a volcanic eruption of unmitigated human suffering; amid the heroism of plane passengers and firemen and cops and neighbors; amid the crush of steel and concrete and glass that flattened 220 stories into a pile barely 50 feet tall--amid the 3,000 deaths that day, something else died too.

By nightfall, it seemed, we had changed from a nation that placed a uniquely high value on privacy and freedom to one that embraced security and safety as first principles. Of course we swapped freedom for safety. Just look again at those people jumping from the twin towers to understand why 78 percent of respondents in a recent Gallup/University of Oklahoma poll favored trading civil liberties for "security" (and why 71 percent supported a national ID card too). Never mind that die trade hasn't made us safer, or that it erodes the freedom that we say is precisely what the terrorists hate about us.

Within days of the attacks, Attorney General John Ashcroft pushed Congress to pass expansive anti-terrorism legislation that was a lawman's wish list (and not very different from the regular requests made by lawmen before 9/11). We must, implored the man who had redirected FBI efforts away from counterterrorism and back toward battling drugs and kiddie porn, make it easier for cops and feds and spies to get the drop on suspects, broaden the definition of and increase the penalties for money laundering, impose new restrictions on immigration, and on and on.

On October 26 President Bush signed the USA PATRIOT Act, an acronym for a law so ludicrously named that it sounds like Thomas Pynchon parodying George Orwell: the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and other critics noted, the legislation ran to 342 pages and made major changes to over a dozen statutes that had limited government surveillance of citizens. We can assume that many legislators and their...