BALANCING CIVIL LIBERTIES AND DOMESTIC SECURITY

Balancing Civil Liberties and Domestic Security

Balancing Civil Liberties and Domestic Security

Introduction

When threat increase, liberties minimize. That has been our history, especially in wartime. And today we face dangers without precedent: a mass action of militant Islamic terrorists who crave martyrdom, conceal in shadows, are fanatically angled on slaughtering as numerous of us as possible and—if they can—using atomic motor truck bombs to obliterate New York or Washington or both, without departing a sign as to the source of the attack.The urgency of penetrating secret terrorist cells makes it imperative for Congress—and the nation—to attempt a candid, searching, and systematic reassessment of the municipal liberties rules that restrict the government's centre investigative and detention powers.(Brzezinski,2003) Robust nationwide argument and premeditated congressional activity should restore what has so far been mostly publicity hoc presidential improvisation. While the USA-PATRIOT Act—no form of very careful deliberation—changed numerous rules for the better (and some for the worse), it did not feel some others that should be changed.

Discussion

Carefully crafted new legislation would be good not only for security but also for liberty. Stubborn adherence to the civil liberties status quo would probably damage our most fundamental freedoms far more in the long run than would judicious modifications of rules that are less fundamental. Considered congressional action based on open national debate is more likely to be sensitive to civil liberties and to the Constitution's checks and balances than unilateral expansion of executive power. Courts are more likely to check executive excesses if Congress sets limits for them to enforce. Government agents are more likely to respect civil liberties if freed from rules that create unwarranted obstacles to doing their jobs.(Welch,2004)reventing terrorist mass murders is the best way of avoiding a panicky stampede into truly oppressive police statism, in which measures now unthinkable could suddenly become unstoppable.

Recalibrating the Liberty-Security Balance

The courts, Congress, the president, and the public have from the beginning of this nation's history demarcated the scope of protected rights "by a weighing of competing interests...the public-safety interest and the liberty interest," in the words of Judge Richard A. Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. "The safer the nation feels, the more weight judges will be willing to give to the liberty interest."

During the 1960s and 1970s, the weight on the public safety side of the scales seemed relatively modest. The isolated acts of violence by groups like the Weather Underground and Black Panthers—which had largely run their course by the mid-1970s—were a minor threat compared with our enemies today. Suicide bombers were virtually unheard of. By contrast, the threat to civil liberties posed by broad governmental investigative and detention powers and an imperial presidency had been dramatized by Watergate and by disclosures of such ugly abuses of power as FBI Director J. Edgar

As a result, today many of the investigative powers that government could use to penetrate al-Qaida cells—surveillance, informants, searches, seizures, wiretaps, arrests, interrogations, detentions—are tightly restricted by a web of laws, judicial precedents, ...