Surveillance

Since 9/11 we've seen the passing of the Patriot Act as lead to many erosions of rights. The ACLU has a webpage devoted to explaining which of our rights have been violated by the Act. Remember the Fourth Amendment? It's gone. The Patriot Act gives the FBI the ability to monitor you in every way without probable cause of a crime. Since then there has been over 1 million United States citizens added to the terrorist watch list.
The problem with this is these methods to not stop an attack from happening. If one does, we should expect to see more surveillance, more wiretapping, and so on. This cause and affect relationship is happening with regards to crime. Every year our government puts more police on the roads, and more people in prison, with little affect on crime. So the next year, they build more prisons, put more people in jail, and make the punishments for crime greater, but to no avail. Currently, there are more people in jail in the USA than in any other country in the world. As a response the police become more totalitarian. They must, because to them what they were doing last year wasn't working so they must be stricter.
The UK is quickly becoming a big brother country, with more CCTV cameras than anywhere else. And yet last year the chief of police admitted that they haven't deterred crime. The agencies there also monitor phone calls, and there are programs in the works to record all traffic from everyone's computers to create profiles of the citizens. This is being done not to deter a terrorist threat, but to keep better control of their system. And the people are compliant, out of fear. Their goal is to keep the system the way it is, to stop change. I've read articles about activists being arrested in masse for simply planning to protest. They were under arrest for suspicion of something or other.
The problem is surveillance on our own citizens will be vastly ineffective at combating crime or terrorism. As it gets worse they will increase these measures. The fear I have is that there may come a day when you cannot talk on the phone or internet and say something angrily about the government, a politician, or the country itself without having a knock at the door and asked to be interrogated. This is a free country we must be able to speak out against what we don't like, even in the extreme it is our right to question authority. Great change in this country has happened because of this ability. Imagine before we gained our independence that England had surveillance technologies that were able to keep track of the founding fathers phone calls, and cameras on the street corners. Our revolution would have been squashed from the get go, even if it was beneficial to the people, it would not have been to the government of England and it would have been stopped immediately. There have been many times that change has occurred in this country that wasn't in the best interest of the government but in the best interests of the people. With a vast surveillance system at that time, change may never have occurred!
The little protection Surveillance may bring to terrorism is not worth what it can take away from the people. We must be able to share radical ideas, we must be able to question the government without fear. We must maintain the ability to congregate for social change. There may be a time when the people want change but not the government, we will need our rights.

Benjamin Franklin a founding father that signed both the Constitution and the Declaration of Indepence once said: "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."