"And what of liberty? A view taken by many apologists for massive surveillance holds that liberty is what is left once you have subtracted all the obedience and good behavior required by government to secure for the people a long life. But nothing could be more remote from the spirit of liberty. The Declaration of Independence -- with which the Constitution means to be as consistent as a framework of laws can possibly be -- holds instead that liberty is integral. It is not something you can add or subtract bits of. Liberty denotes the condition of the person who judges for himself, and whose actions are not constrained by an external power hidden from himself.
The contemporary notion of a "trade-off" between liberty and security, contrary to the understanding of the American founders, assumes that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are separable goods. They are separate in our experience, so the argument runs, and therefore they must be separate in our political calculations. But life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were not so divisible in the eyes of the constitutional framers. Free existence, but with all the unavoidable risks of hap and mishap: that was their sense of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, taken together. The words express as comprehensive a unity as faith, hope, and charity. ...
"Thoughtless people," wrote Emerson, "contradict as readily the statement of perceptions as of opinions, or rather much more readily." The leaders and functionaries who in the past twelve years have imposed on the United States a massive system of secret surveillance are best looked on not as betrayers but as thoughtless people. They have forgotten the moral perceptions that were once felt to make the United States a country exemplary for its freedom. The work of this moment is to compel them to see again what people who understand liberty have never failed to see."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bromwich/surveillance-liberty-security-and-fear_b_3695787.html
| 