57% In U.S. Willing To Give Up Freedoms For Safety

I found this poll to be more than a little depressing. As you probably know, the congressional reaction to the 9/11 tragedy was to pass the Patriot Act -- a law that gave police and intelligence agencies broad new powers to spy on individuals, including American citizens. What once would have required a search warrant issued only with probable cause, can now be done with only a secret letter placed in a secret file by the government.

As expected by many of us who value our freedoms, the government abused the new law and conducted a massive spying campaign against American citizens (which is still going on). The excuse they give is that it is necessary to protect this country from terrorism. The problem with that excuse is that terrorism is not new, and the government has been able to effectively deal with it in the past (without any need for a Patriot Act or the need to abuse the rights and freedoms of American citizens).

The Senate tried the other day to rein in those massive spying powers of the federal government just a little bit, and that effort failed. It seems that too many of our senators don't have a problem with the government's massive spying on its own citizens. One of them even had the audacity to say if the Patriot Act had been in effect before 9/11, then that tragedy could have been prevented -- completely ignoring the fact that our government was warned about those Saudi terrorists, and chose to ignore it.

The sad thing is that a majority of Americans seem to be as stupid as those senators who approve of government spying on Americans. The chart above is from a Rasmussen Poll (done on November 18th and 19th of a random sample of 1,000 likely voters, with a margin of error of 3 points). It shows that 57% of the public is willing to give up their privacy rights (i.e., their freedoms) to protect this country from a terrorist attack. Only a this of the public (33%) understand that once rights are given away, they can usually never be retrieved.

Do these misguided people think that once terrorists are "defeated" the government will abandon their spying on citizens? If so, then they are fools! Governments (of any kind) never willingly give up a power once they have it. Even if terrorism could be eliminated, you can bet the government will come up with some other evil that we must be protected from (to avoid giving up their power to spy on any/all citizens).

Those who wrote our Constitution knew this -- and that's why they included the Bill of Rights to protect American citizens. I think they would be horrified to see how easily modern Americans can be scared into giving up those freedoms.