`  :Your not the only one speaking in a language of old....  From todays CounterPunch dotcom, On this the Seventeenth Day Of January, in the Year of Our Lord 2006.  Bugging America  The Liberties of the Subject  By WERTHER  The overwhelming balance of recorded history has been marked by despotism. When homo sapiens sapiens transitioned from hunter gatherer to agriculturalist, he gained literacy, solid dwellings, and other accoutrements of what is commonly considered civilization. But he experienced a sharp decline in personal liberty.  The reasons for this are commonsensical. Disputes between tribes of hunter gatherers could be resolved by one or the other simply pulling up stakes and relocating to a new territory, there being few material impedimenta to prevent them. A settled agricultural existence, on the other hand, implied permanent villages, granaries, and land boundaries to be defended against depredation. The need for defenses implied a national security state. Agricultural surpluses not only necessitated armed defense, but allowed a division of labor leading to policemen, soldiers, bureaucrats, and tax assessors, the latter of whom would confiscate a percentage of the harvest.  The evolution of labor conditions also implied a different mental outlook. The hunter gatherer was an independent contractor (if not brigand) who ranged over extensive territory and worked alone or in small groups. The agricultural laborer, by contrast, toiled in one spot, making his comings and goings more subject to regulation.  If the land was not his, he became dependent on the Big Man's favor. Given the increased population densities in regions where agricultural societies developed, he could only rarely strike out on his own: the good land had been already taken, and game animals cleared or hunted to local extinction. [1]  With the rise of what Karl Wittfogel call ``hydraulic civilization,`` [2] the screw of oppression turned once again against personal liberty. In order to build the extensive earthworks necessary for the state to survive the next drought or flood, the rulers of these proto-superpowers subjected their subjects to enforced toil and off-duty regimentation which rendered them no more free than so many draft animals.  It is unlikely the rulers of the states in the Valley of Mexico, the Nile, the Euphrates, the Ganges, or the Yang-Tze had much toleration for the complaints their subjects, who were enslaved, enserfed, or otherwise regimented for the greater good as defined by the states' rulers. These complaints, had they been permitted, would have constituted freedom of speech.  Nor would the rulers have given credence to a peasant's assertion that the interior of his crude dwelling, and the contents thereof, were inviolate from the inquisitiveness of the state. He, the peasant, simply had no rights a ruler was bound to respect (to paraphrase what a former Supreme Court Justice once said about slaves in a famous ruling in 1857); the only limit on a ruler's power over his subjects was the former's fear of rebellion should discontent overflow.  Of the two rights discussed thus far, freedom of speech and freedom from arbitrary search and seizure, the latter is fundamentally more important to human beings' maintaining a status above that of mere hive animals. This is not intended in any way to disparage the desirability and necessity of free speech. But there are practical circumstances when free speech is not exercised by reasonable peopledue to reticence, shame, or its merely being not worth the effort. Or when one is married.  Much obnoxious and exhibitionistic behavior is rationalized as free speech, while more urgent matters are suppressed: how many hourly employees feel free to say what they really think of their supervisors, and is the resultant lawsuit really covered by the First Amendment? But asinine reality TV blares on. Out of politeness or discretion, most intelligent people censor their opinions about politics, in-laws, bosses, and religion when they are in the public commons.  The inviolability of one's person, and one's dwelling, is more basic. What would the average person resent more: being told he cannot ask questions of the President of the United States at a staged event, or being ordered to be strip searched in public? Or, for that matter, have his house ransacked? That is the principle at issue. The lesser freedom is essential for political discourse, the greater freedom distinguishes us from dogs. [3]  Respect for privacy, for oneself and one's fellow citizens, is the benchmark of a sense of an individual self. The majority of psychologically well adjusted people believes that there are facts and circumstances about them that just do not bear the glaring searchlight of public revelation. Some things are simply private. At the same time, well adjusted people do not poke their noses unnecessarily into the lives of others, as much out of good taste and a low threshold of disgust as high principle. The snoop and the village Nosy Parker are butts of derision in popular lore.  How did this highly refined sense of individuation develop in the species, given the overwhelming pressures in the other direction? The pharaohs, emperors, and potentates whose mighty works arose between 30 degrees north latitude and the Tropic of Cancer seem to have had the weather gage: division and regimentation of labor as a means of increasing population density and thus state wealth were the wave of the future. A docile workforce certainly could not be secure in its homes, papers, and affects, the future Fourth Amendment to the Constitution notwithstanding. There was no profit in letting the proles be themselves.  Somewhere in isolated temperate regions, difficult to conquer militarily, there arose sometime after 1000 AD a contrary view. The Saxon theign, the Swiss cowherd swearing his oath at the Rütli, the deliberations of the Icelandic Allthing, were the beginnings of the idea of the liberty of the subject. [4] We may seek concrete reasons why these societies thought their inhabitants were above mere chattel, or we may ascribe it to miraculous happenstance. But it happened, and we should be grateful.  At some point, these societies developed the concept of an Über-law, or constitution, a law that not even a king could violate without punishment. Hence such magnificent works of poetry as the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, and the Swiss Federal Charter. The concept of swearing allegiance to the principles embodied in the words on a piece of parchment, rather than to a king, should be familiar to most federal employees today, regardless of the willingness of some of them to engage in squalid black-bag shenanigans against the public trust and their own oath.  But constitutions, like laws, are not self-enforcing. For every Runnymede, there was a Star Chamber. For every United States Constitution, there was a Patriot [sic] Act. For every person who regards himself as an individual, there is another who has no self respect as a person, and who counts himself as a partisan of what he naively thinks is the home team, cheering on his side like a prole in the Circus Maximus in imperial Rome.  Where are we now, in the Year of Our Lord 2006? We will not reiterate in detail the recent newspaper bulletins which reveal that the present administration is ransacking the personal effects of United States citizen ostensibly in order to fight the so-called Global War on Terrorism. [5]. We will merely make a few observations.  First, not only is ``the president's program`` (as the warrantless intercepts are called in the chaste corridors of the West Wing) an obvious example of lawbreaking, but so is the Patriot [sic] Act itself, which some observers profess to view as a legally authorized and legitimate vehicle for government intrusion into the live of private citizens.  Section 215 of the Act addresses so-called National Security Letters, which involve a government search of libraries, credit agencies, health care providers, or any organization that keeps records on citizens. The organization served with such a letter is prohibited from speaking about it to anyone. This is the so-called ``gag order,`` much discussed in House and Senate proceedings but thus far hardly discussed in terms of its ramifications.  A plain reading of the gag order shows it to be a clear violation of the right in Amendment I of the United States Constitution to ``petition the Government for a redress of Grievances,`` which is commonly interpreted as the right to communicate with one's Member of Congress or Senator. This fact has somehow escaped the Blackstones and Perry Masons who populate the law commentary bailiwicks of the newspaper and television.  Second, given the scope of ``the president's program,`` we are entitled to wonder how recess appointment to the position of United Nations ambassador John Bolton was so keenly interested in signals intelligence, and why the White House was so adamant in refusing the Senate access to documentation in relation to this fact.  Equally puzzling is the fact that in the campaign season of 2004, the White House knew every detail of the CBS story about the incumbent president's air national guard service and had a detailed refutation/cover story ready to be released as the story aired. Similarly surprising was how presidential advisor Karl Rove was able to develop a complex alibi to dodge a perjury indictment: almost as if he knew exactly what special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald knew.  Third, we are entitled to speculate (as U.S. citizens, are we not?) about the manifold increase in signals traffic