BROOKE GLADSTONE: On October 26, 2001, while the country was still reeling from the terrorist attacks just one month before, Congress rushed through a bill called the USA PATRIOT Act, a rather awkward acronym which stands for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism. The bill is 342 pages long and makes changes to 15 different statutes. Among other provisions, the government now has broader powers to monitor web searches and make use of wiretaps. It allows for secret court subpoenas and detentions. It can act without the customary checks and balances and impose gag orders on others. And now a new bill called Patriot II or Son of the Patriot Act seeks to expand those powers even more -- all in the name of the war against terrorism. President Bush after all did warn us that much of that battle would be unseen, and apparently that applies both to the terrorists and to the U.S. government.

BOB GARFIELD:In a little-noticed public appearance recently Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was asked about the incremental erosion of civil liberties under the Patriot Act and other measures. His reply was that individual freedoms in America are quote "Way beyond what the Constitution requires" and can be scaled back by the government to suit the perceived level of threat. What Scalia didn't feel the need to add was that this is a work long since in progress. [CASCADING MONTAGE:]

MAN 1: Records from back in the Reagan presidency that had been scheduled for release this year also have been kept under wraps.

MAN 2: The so-called "sneak and peek" provisions whereby the government can go in and conduct searches without telling a person, take stuff without leaving them an inventory has not yet been challenged. WO

MAN 3: The GAO wants to see a list of all the non-governmental individuals Vice President Cheney's Energy Task Force met with last year. The president says that's a major invasion of his prerogatives.

MAN 4: You know, the original idea was to have 24 million Americans calling in tips on their neighbors...

BOB GARFIELD: These are dangerous times, we are so often reminded, and so they are. Since September 11th even political speech, perhaps the most fundamental of our freedoms, has become a risky proposition. This week the New York Times reported that a "no fly list" compiled as a terrorism filter by the federal Transportation Security Administration has interfered with the air travel of prominent anti-war activists. And who can forget what happened when Bill Maher, host of TV's defunct "Politically Incorrect," was:

BILL MAHER: We have been the cowards. Lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away-- that's cowardly.

BOB GARFIELD: First Maher lost his advertisers and then his entire program. That, after an unusual admonishment from presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer.

ARI FLEISCHER: They're reminders to all Americans that they need to, to watch what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that. There never is.

BOB GARFIELD:Watch ourselves indeed, because -- remember: [CNN WAR IN IRAQ MUSIC] we are at war. We are surely at war...in Iraq, against terrorism the world over, and at home where the very desire to protect the freedoms Americans hold dear is in combat with the sacred freedoms themselves. Ellen Schrecker, professor of history at Yeshiva University and author of three books on the McCarthy era, feels an eerie sense of deja vu.

ELLEN SCHRECKER: In every case these incursions against basic American constitutional rights are being carried out in the name of national security. You know that was why the government rounded up the Japanese Americans during World War II. That was why the government cracked down during the red scare right after World War I. That was the basis of almost every single violation of political freedom during the McCarthy period. It was all being done in the name of national security, and today the same thing has happened.

BOB GARFIELD:Domestic spying and other manifestations of the post-9/11 environment are especially stark. A less obvious but at least as ominous development is the government's refusal to disclose its actions. Steve Aftergood is director of the Federation of American Scientists' project on government secrecy.

STEVE AFTERGOOD: It's a question of the defining characteristic of our political system, namely how much information is the public entitled to have about what the government does.

BOB GARFIELD:A basic principle of democracy is that transparency, not opaqueness, is the public's first safeguard against scoundrels and fools, but from its earliest days, Aftergood says, the Bush administration started drawing the blackout curtains. In its first year it classified 33 million documents -- 40 percent more than the last year of the Clinton administration, often under puzzling standards of sensitivity. For instance, the CIA has a handbook offering its public affairs officers guidance on what may or may not be released to the public. That handbook, in response to a Freedom of Information request, has itself been classified as a secret. And with Al Qaeda's attacks, Aftergood says, came a legitimate pretext for more security still. For reaction, and overreaction.

STEVE AFTERGOOD: Thousands of declassified documents that had been available in the national archives and elsewhere were removed. Many thousands of government web pages on all kinds of topics from aviation safety to environmental matters to almost every other activity that the government performs -- all kinds of information along those lines was, was withdrawn on a indiscriminate basis.

BOB GARFIELD:Governments make mistakes. Some innocent; some otherwise. Sometimes only historians and journalists working with the benefit and detachment of hindsight can understand what truly went on. That's why the Presidential Records Act makes those records available --after a period of 12 years following a president's leaving office. Scott Nelson is a lawyer representing the National Security Archive.

SCOTT NELSON: It's precisely because they're the candid, firsthand, first draft of history that historians and journalists who want to write an account of what happened need to have access to them.

BOB GARFIELD:But they no longer do. The National Security Archive is suing the Bush administration over an executive order giving an ex-president or the sitting president the right to assert executive privilege over the records, forbidding the national archivist from releasing them. Scott Nelson.

SCOTT NELSON: One of the explanations the White House gave for the executive order was national security, and they wrapped themselves to some degree in the events of, of September 11th as a cover for a decision that they had already made before then for other reasons.

BOB GARFIELD:One could easily ask at a time like this why don't we just let the government do what it has to do to protect us without the media and a bunch of public interest gadflies making the administration's job more difficult? In fact, that seems to be exactly the question many Americans do ask. A post 9/11 New York Times/CBS news poll showed that 64 percent of Americans are willing to surrender some rights during wartime. 80 percent supported the indefinite detention of suspicious immigrants. And in a survey by the Freedom Forum's First Amendment Center, though 90 percent of the respondents supported freedom of the press in general, when polled on the particulars they were strikingly less supportive. Center director, Gene Policinski.

GENE POLICINSKI: You had 42 percent of Americans saying they disagreed with newspapers being able to freely criticize the government, which is a fairly scary number when you think about what we've traditionally had in this country as a sort of a counterweight to what the government does.

BOB GARFIELD:This isn't necessarily a new phenomenon. Former L.A. Times Washington bureau chief Jack Nelson is author of a study on government secrecy for Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.

JACK NELSON: You know I've been a reporter for over 50 years, and that's been my experience over the years that the public just doesn't get too excited about the fact that they're, they're denied access to information to which they're entitled!

BOB GARFIELD:Wartime incites a particular patriotic zeal, and the tendency for citizens to interpret any criticism of the government not as quintessentially American but as Un-American trash talk about its sacred institutions. When country music star Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks badmouthed President Bush in Europe, her records were boycotted at radio stations throughout the United States. Only this month actors Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, stars of the baseball classic Bull Durham, found themselves dis-invited from the Baseball Hall of Fame when their anti-war pronouncements were deemed too un-American for America's pastime. After 9/11, sensing that Americans needed to brush up on exactly what freedom means, the Advertising Council -- the people who brought you Smoky the Bear, released a series of public service announcements designed to remind us to cherish our rights as citizens. One was set in a library, a library in some nightmarish parallel society in which the freedoms we take for granted simply do not exist. [PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT:]

MAN: Excuse me. I can't seem to find these anywhere.

WOMAN: Huh! [INTAKE OF BREATH] These books are no longer available.

MAN: I didn't know.

WOMAN: May I have your name please?

MAN: Why?! What did I do?

COP: We just have a couple of questions-- [STRUGGLE]

WOMAN: Easy! Easy--

BOB GARFIELD: The spot is still running, but it slices with an edge unintended by its authors. Because under the hastily-legislated and hauntingly named Patriot Act, federal agents are indeed permitted to search the records of libraries and bookstores to see what potential terrorists are reading, to confiscate hard drives from library computers, and to gag librarians from so much as acknowledging these investigations took place. Historian Ellen Schrecker has spent her career being asked whether McCarthyesque repression could ever happen again. She's always answered, "probably but not in the same way."

ELLEN SCHRECKER: Now there's no "probably" -- it's happening, and it's happening in ways that certainly are different -- but I think are much more scary, much more invasive of the rights of ordinary people. And what worries me is the fact that there doesn't seem to be much of a defense against it.

BOB GARFIELD:Well, there's one. As President Jefferson reminded us, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. And as President Bush has told us again and again, we cannot sit idly by while American freedom comes under attack.