It’s time to fight for Constitutional rights

What is the value of personal freedom?

To a person who has none, possibly everything. The ability to walk down a sandy beach. The ability to search for employment that is pleasing. The ability to read, write, listen to and speak words that hold truth for oneself. The ability to freely travel between countries. The ability to marry a person of one’s choice, create a family and a home. The ability to expand one’s knowledge and engage in meaningful dialogue. The ability to question one’s government, as granted by the amendments to the Constitution, and to be free from search or seizure without probable cause.

How much we daily take for granted.

Three distinct events in the past week tweaked the grounding upon which I measure my personal freedoms. The first drew from what seemed a harmless e-mail I received from a friend, a tasteless joke about makeup that included an image of the president. Laughable, but not serious, except that one of the recipient’s in my friends broadcast mailing took offense. He accused my friend of propagating the “dirty work of the left,” and my friend leans about as much to the right as anyone I know.

I continue to be frustrated by this divisive squaring off of the red states against the blue. Since my social orientation is tilted left, my friend’s received e-mail must mean that a select group of people see me as a dirty blue.

I’m not quite sure how to absorb this, since my fiscal leanings are more closely aligned with the right, which would be considered red. Does this make me purple? And if so, what state can I live in?

The second tweaking event was an article in the Washington Post about surveillance cameras being installed in a small town in Bellow Falls, Vt. This is a town where there are eight police officers, two barbershop chairs, one movie screen and not much happening. There wasn’t any need for the cameras, but money was forthcoming from the federal government for security measures, and there wasn’t much else on which to spend the funds.

Bellow Falls is far from the only small town to install these types of cameras -- all in response to government funds that, if not used, will be withdrawn. Similar scenarios have played out in Galex and Tazewell, Va., as well as Preston, Md. None of these communities had high incidences of crime or any real reason for the camera installations.

But those cities are now watching everyone who walks down the street -- just as they are in Chicago, New York City, Baltimore, San Francisco, Washington and the beaches in Malibu, Venice, Hermosa, Redondo and Santa Monica. “They” are watching me, and they are watching you, and no one seems to be saying so much as a peep.

Sometimes we give up our freedoms so quietly that we don’t hear them falling at all.

The third event of the week was two-fold. The first was the subpoena of Google for one million random Web addresses and the records of all searches from any one-week period. Since I “Google” several times in a day for research in my work, this could include my records. Fortunately, Google has refused to comply.

The next reveal was of the use of warrantless wiretaps by President Bush, who has said that he had “no regrets about ordering wiretaps of Americans without court-issued warrants” and that he will continue to use what he calls a “‘terrorist surveillance program.”

His argument is that post-9/11 powers give him the right to use anything he deems appropriate in his war against terrorism. Critics have called it a direct violation of the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which was passed in response to abuses in the Nixon administration, which included surveillance of political opponents and critics in the news media.

The Fourth Amendment guarantees, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Precedence against wiretaps, based on the Fourth Amendment, was clearly laid out in the findings of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, in Olmstead v. United States (1928): “Whenever a telephone line is tapped, the privacy of the persons at both ends of the line is invaded, and all conversations between them upon any subject, and although proper, confidential, and privileged, may be overheard.... As a means of espionage, writs of assistance and general warrants are but puny instruments of tyranny and oppression when compared with wire tapping.”

I cannot help but wonder what the framers of our Constitution and our Founding Fathers might think of our current state of affairs. Freedoms were worth fighting for then, and they are worth protecting now.

Whether you are red, blue or, like me, purple, this is still your country and these are still your rights. It’s up to you to speak up and protect them.

* Catharine Cooper seeks wild places. She can be reached at ccooper@cooperdesign.net. She “Googled” for her Supreme Court and Constitutional references.

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