Are you fucking kidding me? No, that's not within 100 miles of the truth.

counterexample?

I'm going to with "Entire Vietnam War" on that. No, wait: how about the Sandinista war, which was so well concealed nobody even fucking knew it happened.

You think terrorists drove us mad with fear, try actually reading some of the history of the 20th century and imagine what we would have done, in an era before our modern feeling of entitlement to privacy and to open dissent, when our enemy was vast, spectacularly well-armed, beat us into space, and had nuclear missiles pointed in our face.

The compass points towards liberty, but sometimes we walk east, or west, or, during the Kennedy and Nixon and Reagan administrations, fucking south.

But there were some very courageous people who did openly dissent. My mother's uncle (John Caughlan) was first kicked out of his law firm and shortly thereafter the ACLU for standing up and saying that the Communist Party USA had Constitutional rights too and they should be defended (and defend them he did for which he earned a year in prison but did not lose his license to practice law and continued the fight pretty much up until his death).

There is an interesting interview with him at http://depts.washington.edu/labhist/cpproject/caughlan_inter...

It is worth noting that our strong protections of open dissent were specifically created by the court in response to very dramatic overreaches by the government.

Fair point. However the public actually dissented due to Vietnam, which indicates that the propaganda effort was unsuccessful. In today's world, consent has been effectively manufactured.

Twas. Ever. Thus. They protested Vietnam, and sometimes the National Guard mowed them down with assault rifles.

The notion that protesters ended the Vietnam war is also ahistorical, a fiction designed to flatter the boomers.

FWIW I don't foresee any significant protest or dissent over the surveillance state.

All three branches of government appear to have overwhelmingly agreed on the new monitoring schemes. We're walking west by northwest; not south. I agree, though, we need to turn northward.

Every US war has been accompanied by the suppression of civil liberties. Eventually, the mistakes tend to be rolled back. At the outset of the Civil War, Lincoln suspended habeus corpus. During WWI, Wilson outlawed dissent against the war. During WWII, Roosevelt threw Japanese Americans into camps in the desert.

If you were Japanese-American, wouldn't you agree that we need to roll back mistakes NOW and not wait?

I'm responding to the "Eventually" you wrote. When you're digging yourself a grave, the sooner you put down your shovel and get out of the hole, the better.

My comment was descriptive, not prescriptive; I was trying to provide some perspective.

I live in LA and personally know families who spent time in those camps. I also know screenwriting families who lost their jobs during the 1950s Hollywood blacklist. So yes, those mistakes were real, and they can divert the course of lives for the worse.

In the flawed world we live in, it takes time for people to change their minds and muster the political will to roll them back. This is generally prompted by over-reach. For example, as the cold war started to cool off a bit, the Church Committee (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee) and the Pike Committee (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pike_Committee). Maybe we're seeing such a time now.