Tap Dance With Lady Liberty

I have a sure-fire way to protect myself from the impending government assault on privacy: I simply presume I have little of it. That way, no one can take what I don’t possess.

Perhaps you call this a defeatist attitude. You think I’ve already surrendered, so I’m useless in the fight for civil liberties, for freedom, as the government pursues more wiretapping and eavesdropping. I like to think that I’m just a realist. I’m not going to fight for ground that has already been lost. There’s a different place to draw a line in the sand and defend our liberty.

As things stand, it seems to me that the authorities already can wiretap the phones of whoever they want and whenever they want and, no doubt, for as long as they want. And that includes me, if they want. And when it comes to other electronic links, e-mail and the Web, I figure that not just the authorities but my employer and rank teenagers everywhere can peep in at will. Now we’re going to have more of it.

I have lived abroad and worked in countries where privacy and freedom did not exist, even in abridged form. And I have come to the conclusion that the biggest difference between those police states and our own state--that is, what determines freedom in this crowded and dangerous world--is why the authorities collect information and what they do with it, not how they collect it.

How difficult is it today in the U.S. to get a judge to approve a wiretap? Well, from what I can glean from experts, it’s about as difficult as selling a $20 bill on the street corner for two $5 bills. You almost never get turned down.

According to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, law enforcement has sought more than 20,000 domestic wiretaps in recent years, with only 28 of them rejected by judges. There have been more than 10,000 special requests placed before judges who oversee wiretaps in national security and terrorism cases. The Los Angeles Times reported that only one has been turned down.

The lesson here: Folks, if they want to wiretap you, they will. That means 2nd Amendment agitators on the political right and 1st Amendment activists on the left. They’ll probe your bank accounts and maintain dossiers on your movements.

I remember a while back when some of my friends joined the fad of filing freedom of information requests just for the chance to see their FBI files. In a totalitarian state, those files would have meant a ticket to the gulag. Here, they ended up as amusements at cocktail parties. About the worst thing a politically minded person could discover was that they were so unimportant that the government wasn’t watching them.

The new anti-terrorism law sought by the Bush administration is supposed to put law enforcement on the same footing as those who would do us harm. I suspect that much of the push is a face-saving diversion. There is plenty of surveillance authority already on the books. It wasn’t the law that failed us, but our law enforcers.

Today, expanded means for government surveillance is less a worry than the old-fashioned tendency of government to cut the corners of due process in a crisis. Frozen bank accounts and detentions are already in the headlines--as if to suggest that federal authorities are making quick “progress” in the war on terrorism.

I heard the same things when this country launched its failed war on drugs and started seizing the assets of drug lords. But later, you could scratch beneath the headlines and find that what was “seized” was a family farm. Why? Because a farmer’s distant nephew planted some marijuana in a glade of trees down by the creek.

Police went on a binge of seizures. They fattened their budgets with their share of profits from the sale of seized property. Years later, we can look back and see that the drug trade has prospered better than the U.S. Constitution.

So now the government is talking about going after assets again. Hundreds of people have been detained. The FBI wants us to know that it’s cracking the ring of terror.

I’d feel better if I knew the authorities were acting on solid information.

In this Information Age, information can protect us from terror. It can also protect us from a government that might otherwise presume guilt from guilt by association. If they’re out to find the truth, the truth will keep us free.