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The government can monitor your phone calls and can read your e-mails and open your snail mail.
The government can access records of your large financial transactions, such as buying a house.
Law enforcement officers can bust into your home when you're not there, riffle through your belongings, plant a recording device on your computer, and leave without notifying you for at least thirty days -- and maybe a lot more.
You no longer have the right to protest where the president or vice president can see you, or at major public events when they aren't even present.
Law enforcement officers can now monitor you in public if you are merely exercising your political rights.
They can infiltrate your political organizations.
And they can keep track of you at your place of worship. The government can find out from bookstores and libraries the material you've been reading, and the bookstore owner and the librarian can't talk about it, except to their lawyers, for a whole year -- or more.
The government can hold you in preventive detention for months on end as a "material witness."
If you're not a citizen the government can deport you on a technicality or for mere political association.
If you're not a citizen the government can label you an "enemy combatant" and send you to secret prisons around the world, where you may never see the light of day again -- much less a lawyer or a judge. And even if you are a citizen, the government can label you an enemy combatant and hold you in solitary confinement here in the United States.
Under George W. Bush's interpretation of the president's powers during the so-called war on terror he can do just about whatever he wants. He cites the Authorization for Use of Military Force bill, which Congress passed on September 18, 2001, as the justification for this enormous leeway.
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