So ever since 9/11 the politicians have been eroding American freedoms (can you say "PATRIOT Act"?) and generally behaving as though American citizens had no rights. Well, they soon won't if they aren't careful - as Benjamin Franklin so famously said "Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither." The point of view that the government owes nothing short of total protection to each and every citizen is at best unrealistic, and at worst delusional, yet politicians appear to feel that they cannot afford to give the lie to this myth lest they be seen not to care.

The latest piece of federal government misbehavior that has come to my notice is in a report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on the gross disregard for the law demonstrated by the FBI in intelligence investigations between 2001 and 2008. One imagines that the individual agents were for the most part motivated by a wish to catch criminals and bring them to justice. Yet this catalog of delays and lies to courts and judges makes it clear that the sanctity of the legal system was not uppermost in the agents' minds, otherwise these offenses would never have been committed.

In all the EFF estimates that upwards of 40,000 intelligence violations may have been committed in the nine years since 9/11. But the rule of law is a strange and delicate thing. Those who are responsible for upholding the laws appear to hold them in such pitiful regard that they are broken without compunction. We are talking 4,500 offenses a year, or about twelve per day across the whole country. This rate of offending is so staggering it is impossible to think about investigating and prosecuting them all, thereby giving these law enforcement officers effective immunity from their crimes.

The question that I cannot now get out of my mind is, since all these violations were apparently committed in the name of upholding freedom and democracy, why is it necessary to bypass or ignore the constraints of just the system they profess to be trying to support. What value do freedom and democracy have if the only way they can be protected is to ignore the democratic controls that they impose? This is such a basic question that in a country like the USA I cannot imagine why it is not on everyone's lips.