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A really good read describing just what is so repellant about the attitude of many fearful people. 'It is all right for 'those' people to lose their Constitutional rights. They are just drug dealers, or terrorists. It won't happen to me.' But they ignore the fact that it is the government who says what 'those' people are. We only know they are a drug dealer because the Police called them that. Until proven in a court of law, they are supposed to be no different than any other citizen.
Let me put it this way: Governments make mistakes. They are just people. We have the Constitution to help prevent mistakes by having a lot of oversight into things that affect citizens. By removing layers of oversights, we increase the chances of mistakes. How many mistakes are we willing to permit? How about this? We 'kidnapped' a German citizen, rendered him to another country where he was tortured, before it was determined that we had taken the wrong man. Now, we at least had enough morality to release the man when the mistake was found. Why? Most likely because various oversight procedures would have revealed it. Without that oversight, we could have just 'disappeared' him without anyone ever knowing we made a mistake.
If you now take the argument that the Government can decide a priori who gets to keep their rights and who gets to lose them, then we are well on the way to a dictatorship. Hell, our Government followed John Lennon,and others, not because they were doing anything criminal, but because they opposed Nixon. This is the final course of letting the Government decide who gets rights and who does not, with no 'court niceties' or oversight. They get to define who is a criminal, which ALWAYS ends up meaning anyone who dissents. That is what the American Revolution was fought over. The only reason these fearful people want to hand this much power to the Government is because they somehow naively trust that when the Authorities call someone a criminal, they must be. These people do not deserve to live in a democratic society. It requires too much.
When the Government gets to take away rights without any judicial review, when we have people saying a 10 year old girl can be strip searched simply because some official 'thinks' her dad may be a criminal, and we do nothing, we have simply demonstrated how far we have fallen from the ideals of our Founders. For the President to maintain that he will continue with illegal surveillance, and that no one can stop him, makes me very sad for the degraded form of republican democracy as practiced by the late United States. I guess Jefferson was right:
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence.
The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.
Every generation needs a new revolution.
Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.
Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.
I suppose I am now on somebody's list, what with the mention of tyranny, despots and revolution. Fear is how despots have always gained power. As Franklin said: Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both. 12:48:31 PM 
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