Civil Liberties After 9/11
Description
As the federal government continues to address new national security issues in the wake of September 11, 2001, the uneasy balance between security and civil liberties is receiving renewed attention. This lecture reviews government reactions to past national security crises and explores the important trade–offs and considerations facing citizens and non–citizens alike.Essay
Government bears the responsibility for our security, domestic and foreign. In meeting that responsibility, it is charged with striking a balance between liberty and security. Events over the past two decades have raised, perhaps to a fever pitch, concerns over national security. Not surprisingly, those concerns have produced a call for greater government power as well as an outcry against restrictions on personal freedom.There are lessons to be learned from the history of our government's reaction to concerns about national security. The teaching of that history ranges from concerns that the government has failed to meet its obligation to concerns over the false or careless claims of threats to gain political leverage and excessive reactions to real threats. That history also reveals a pattern of expansion and retraction of government power to restrict liberty in the name of security. Finally, the history reveals that the government has frequently claimed that the threat it faces is unique and therefore requires unprecedented government action.
All of these lessons have some application to our current situation. It is undeniable that we face some sort of threat. Technology, an extremely dynamic arena, brings threats in a form previously not possible. Globalization rapidly exposes us to virtually all parts of the world at any time of the day. But on reflection we come to understand that to one degree or another, that has always been true; technology has been a facet of life for centuries and the world has been constantly "shrinking."
In the current debates surrounding the tension between civil liberties and national security, what are the lessons of history? How can citizens inform themselves and participate in the process? What liberties are we prepared to yield to gain security? The lecture attempts to explore these questions with the audience and to ask it to provide answers.
The lecture begins by setting the stage for defining "national security" from the government's perspective; the device is the English perspective of the American Revolution. The British reaction to the threat of colonial rebellion set a pattern which can be observed over our history. From that concept of national security, we move to the concept of civil liberty as that term is understood in our national law. Here, the focus is on both the limitations on government and the experience of those who framed those limitations with national crisis both as revolutionaries and as founders of a new nation — and a new form of government.
Armed with those conceptual perspectives, we explore a number of government reactions to threats to security from the Revolutionary era through the McCarthy era "witchhunts" for un–American activity in the 1950's. That history leads to a discussion of the "terrorists" threats from 1993 to present and the government reactions to those threats, including the USA Patriot Act. The audience is asked to react to the questions propounded above and prodded by specific problems of how far they are prepared to go in torture, incarceration without charge or trial, etc.
