With unparalleled freedom of expression and guarantees of personal privacy and due process, we enjoy the benefits of a government firmly rooted in the constitutional protection of individual rights. But, in response to 9/11, analysts left and right say the executive branch has grown too big for its britches, assuming power that threatens the very values on which America was founded. National leaders from conservatives David Keene and Grover Norquist to liberal Al Gore agree on their opposition to new measures they say only weaken security while threatening individual freedoms.

From Baltimore to Boise, states, counties and cities across the nation 215 to date have voted to oppose the Patriot Act as citizens challenge what they see as “a threat to the democratic process.” Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to decide whether the President has the right to imprison those being held at Guantanamo Bay without trial. In the just-opened Jose Padilla trial, three Appeals Court judges will decide whether the executive branch can seize U.S. citizens and unilaterally remove them from constitutional protection.

Meanwhile, the Senate Judiciary Committee has begun hearings on the state of civil liberties post-9/11. A flurry of changes in our government’s balance of power concerns lovers of liberty and security from across the political spectrum:

• The federal government can monitor every website we visit, keep lists of our e-mail correspondences, and get a list of all books we check out from the library
  
  
• Once classified as an “enemy combatant,” any American citizen can be imprisoned indefinitely without charge, without the right to see a lawyer, call their family or have a trial
  
  
• FBI agents can investigate citizens without probable cause if it falls under “intelligence purposes”
  
  
• Military commissions charged with trying suspected terrorists can convict by a two-thirds vote based on hearsay and secret evidence with no defense arguments allowed
  
  
• Nearly 8,000 immigrants of Arab or South Asian decent have been interrogated based solely on their ethnic background or religion. 82,000 people have been interrogated under oath, fingerprinted and photographed during “Special Registrations”
  
  
• Designated a “law-free zone,” the detention center at Guantanamo Bay now holds some 700 inmates, most in 6’ x 8’ solitary confinement cells
  

How much private information does our government need in order to protect us? What could spark heretofore unheard of “Hell Freezes Over” conservative-liberal alliances in defense of basic freedoms? When the executive branch charged with the “sole responsibility” of protecting the Constitution says “safety first,” who will assure we retain our basic democratic rights of freedom? Is the price of security the loss of liberty?