Dan Tilli could become the “poster child” for the paranoia and overreaction created by the war on terror. The cantankerous, but harmless, 81-year-old Pennsylvania man was visited last month by Secret Service agents.

The reason? He was suspected of threatening the life of the president.

Tilli had written a letter to the editor of his local newspaper concerning the execution of Saddam Hussein. It contained a phrase the Secret Service considered menacing, “They hanged the wrong man.” Presumably, the agency felt Tilli might muscle his way into the White House and slip a noose around the chief executive’s neck. The agents relaxed, however, after Tilli showed them a scrapbook of 200 such letters he had written, mostly about political topics. They departed his home with an admonition that he not make any threats in his future writings.

As silly as this vignette seems, it illustrates one of the historical truths of American politics. Fear of danger and respect for individual freedom are opposite ends of a seesaw. The more acutely we perceive the former, the more likely we are to sacrifice the latter.

When the public feels threatened by enemies, foreign or domestic, it gives license to our political leaders to restrict the liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights and articulated over more than two centuries by Congress and the Supreme Court. Some of our most revered presidents have used this license to run roughshod over the Constitution in the name of public safety.

In 1798, President John Adams signed the Sedition Act. The act made it a criminal offense for newspaper publishers to print “false, scandalous and malicious” writings about the government with intent to bring it into “contempt or disrepute.” Adams, who had been lambasted for avoiding war with France at a time when France was seizing and confiscating American commercial ships, used the law to jail his most vocal critics in the press.

During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln permitted the incarceration, without charge or trial, of those suspected of aiding or spying for the Confederacy. In World War I, President Woodrow Wilson secured passage of the Espionage Act, making it criminal to bring the government or armed forces into “contempt, scorn, contumely or disrepute.” In 1919, at war’s end, Wilson’s attorney general – pandering to the public’s fear of Bolshevik revolutionary activity – arrested 5,000 suspected radicals and deported hundreds of aliens with ties to left-wing organizations.

In 1942, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the summary roundup and internment of over 100,000 Japanese-American citizens living on the West Coast to eliminate any chance that they might spy for the enemy.

In the late 1940s and 1950s, as the Cold War was heating up, Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower stood mute while Congressional committees subpoenaed, interrogated and publicly disgraced many noteworthy Americans from Hollywood, academia and the State Department whose prior associations with left-wing organizations made them suspect as Communists.

In 1947, Truman also authorized removal from federal employment of anyone considered disloyal to the government by virtue of “membership in, affiliation with or sympathetic association” with any organization or group considered “totalitarian” (used then as a euphemism for “Communist”).

The war on terror, President’s Bush’s response to the World Trade Center attack on 9/11, represents the latest tilt of the seesaw. The effectiveness of the Patriot Act and Homeland Security Agency in thwarting terrorist plots within the U.S. has yet to be assessed. However, their potential for infringing rights of free expression and privacy has already been amply demonstrated.

Two of the most important provisions of the Bill of Rights are the First Amendment – which guarantees freedom of religion, speech, press and peaceable assembly – and the Fourth Amendment, which guarantees the right to be secure in one’s person, house, papers and effects against “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

Most searches can only be conducted pursuant to specifically drawn warrants from a court.

The Patriot Act pushes the envelope of the Fourth Amendment by allowing “sneak-and-peak” searches of business and other records without the target promptly receiving notice that a search is being conducted or an inventory of the items seized. Moreover, search warrants issued by the new “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court” do not, unlike those issued by courts of record, have to be made available for public inspection.

The Bush administration has greatly exceeded even these considerable powers by conducting wholesale domestic phone-record searches and electronic intercepts without any warrants at all. Verizon has recently come under scrutiny by the Maine Public Utilities Commission for its suspected cooperation with the National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping and data-mining programs.

Some citizens have been subjected to overzealous governmental investigation (not to mention arrest and prosecution) because of their extreme political and religious views, expressions protected by the First Amendment. Tilli’s case is a ludicrous example.

Terrorism indeed poses a serious threat to American security. In an era of easy travel, instantaneous communication, porous borders and readily obtainable, highly destructive weapons, such as deadly chemical and biological agents, a few fanatics can wreak havoc, particularly in urban areas.

Vigilance and effective counter-intelligence are certainly appropriate.

However, the seesaw needs to be balanced. If we button down our open society too tightly, government will end up destroying what it is trying to protect – the inalienable right of people like Dan Tilli to speak their mind.

Elliott L. Epstein, a Lewiston attorney, is founder and board president of Museum L-A and an adjunct history instructor at Central Maine Community College. He can be reached at [email protected].
Fear of danger and respect for individual freedom are opposite ends of a seesaw. The more acutely we perceive the former, the more likely we are to sacrifice the latter.