Friends: As you know, I care about America a lot, and I read something just now that cannot be ignored. We live in a democracy and we must participate if it is to work. Agree or disagree, but please take a minute to listen. The article below is about a 16 year old who was arrested in his home under the Patriot Act. I’ve thought and read a lot about government over the years, and this is what I’ve gathered. Please forgive the presumption, but this it also how those wise men who gave birth to this greatest of countries felt and would feel.  Governments, left or right, possessed of ever growing power, will, in the end, oppress and intimidate.   We must  embrace the responsibilities, which are many,  of freedom over the certainty, left unchecked, that untrammeled government power will morph into Big Brother. We cannot tell how long it will take and degree of oppression, but it WILL happen if we do not awaken to the mortal threat our liberty is facing.   If you think I am being alarmist, just read the article below and ask yourself whether we are more or less free than our parents and grandparents were when they were growing up.   Consider for a moment, after a Patriot Act and a Homeland Security department, the very names of which would send shivers down the spine of our founding fathers, whether we are really any safer? We are certainly less free.  Fear is being bred into us, from the swine flu to just about crossing the street, and it is in a fear and uncertainty that governments grow and freedom wanes. Political tacticians know this well, and fear is a consistent vote getter.   Freedom is a most rare, precious, and, thank God, uniquely American development in history of humankind. We have sacred responsibility to ourselves, to the hundreds of thousands of men who died for that freedom,  and to masses of humanity, now and throughout history, who groaned under oppression, to fight for our freedom and liberty. Yet, in a perverse and predictable irony, our liberty is being stripped away under the guise of protecting it. In the good name of public safety, we are being woven into a deadly cocoon. We are told that we live in the most free country in the world, and, in certain cases, especially in realm of choosing ones profession, this is true. But did a little deeper. Are we really that free? And cannot what freedoms we posses be taken at a moment’s notice? From the most trifling impositions of  government power to the most ghastly, we are uniformly heading in the wrong direction: We have to wear a seatbelts (in addition to getting a ticket, the government has made our own cars vessels of harassment if we don’t buckle up), we cannot smoke, can’t drink a beer at the age of 20, we have cameras following us and ticketing us if we brake a law (the number of which, both cameras and laws, increase every year), every website we’ve ever visit can be the subject of investigation, our precise location is at all times available through our cell phones, our calls can be monitored by the NSA. Even 10 years ago, much of this would be shocking. There is simply too vast an apparatus for total control and surveillance at the disposal of governments, controlled by the power hungry and the purchased, for us to go along as business as usual. We must accordingly be more wary than ever towards the growth of government. Instead, Americans are following a path into a dangerous labyrinth of an all-seeing and all-knowing government. Imagine if such vast power got into the wrong hands, or such power the hands of government bureaucrats more interested in themselves than the public. We already have reached the latter. There is a balance between freedom and security. In a national spasm of fear and paranoia after 9/11, Congress passed legislation (the Act)  aimed at terrorist. Not even ten years later is being turned against an American teenager. The has allowed federal agents to rip kids (read below) from their beds and detain them in direct subversion of a victim’s constitutional rights. Indeed, as you will read, he might have made a bomb threat in to his school. OK, not good. Very bad in fact. But this does not make him the kind of terrorist towards whom the Patriot Act was aimed. Government creep. Be very wary of it in all its forms. Without a bedrock belief in rugged individual responsibility and freedom to resist the siren calls of the nanny state, America will slip into abyss of failed attempts at human freedom. What we have achieved in America too rare, too hard fought, too great an example to the world  to be allowed to fail. To end with a little Jefferson who said: “Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.”  We are not a timid people.  Please write your elected representatives to express your concern, dismay, and, hopefully, revulsion to this use of government power. https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml   -Raj P. Bhakta Bottom of Form   Mom says Patriot Act stripped son of due processPosted: Apr. 29, 2009 Oxford, N.C. — Sixteen-year-old Ashton Lundeby’s bedroom in his mother’s Granville County home is nothing, if not patriotic. Images of American flags are everywhere – on the bed, on the floor, on the wall.

But according to the United States government, the tenth-grade home-schooler is being held on a criminal complaint that he made a bomb threat from his home on the night of Feb. 15.WATCH VIDEO
Teen’s mom questions Patriot Act

The family was at a church function that night, his mother, Annette Lundeby, said.

“Undoubtedly, they were given false information, or they would not have had 12 agents in my house with a widow and two children and three cats,” Lundeby said.

Around 10 p.m. on March 5, Lundeby said, armed FBI agents along with three local law enforcement officers stormed her home looking for her son. They handcuffed him and presented her with a search warrant.

“I was terrified,” Lundeby’s mother said. “There were guns, and I don’t allow guns around my children. I don’t believe in guns.”

Lundeby told the officers that someone had hacked into her son’s IP address and was using it to make crank calls connected through the Internet, making it look like the calls had originated from her home when they did not.

Her argument was ignored, she said. Agents seized a computer, a cell phone, gaming console, routers, bank statements and school records, according to federal search warrants.

“There were no bomb-making materials, not even a blasting cap, not even a wire,” Lundeby said.

Ashton now sits in a juvenile facility in South Bend, Ind. His mother has had little access to him since his arrest. She has gone to her state representatives as well as attorneys, seeking assistance, but, she said, there is nothing she can do.

Lundeby said the USA Patriot Act stripped her son of his due process rights.

“We have no rights under the Patriot Act to even defend them, because the Patriot Act basically supersedes the Constitution,” she said. “It wasn’t intended to drag your barely 16-year-old, 120-pound son out in the middle of the night on a charge that we can’t even defend.”

Passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S., the Patriot Act allows federal agents to investigate suspected cases of terrorism swiftly to better protect the country. In part, it gives the federal government more latitude to search telephone records, e-mails and other records.

“They’re saying that ‘We feel this individual is a terrorist or an enemy combatant against the United States, and we’re going to suspend all of those due process rights because this person is an enemy of the United States,” said Dan Boyce, a defense attorney and former U.S. attorney not connected to the Lundeby case.

Critics of the statute say it threatens the most basic of liberties.

“There’s nothing a matter of public record,” Boyce said “All those normal rights are just suspended in the air.”

In a bi-partisan effort, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., and Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., last month introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives a bill that would narrow subpoena power in a provision of the Patriot Act, called the National Security Letters, to curb what some consider to be abuse of power by federal law enforcement officers.

Boyce said the Patriot Act was written with good intentions, but he said he believes it has gone too far in some cases. Lundeby’s might be one of them, he said.

“It very well could be a case of overreaction, where an agent leaped to certain conclusions or has made certain assumptions about this individual and about how serious the threat really is,” Boyce said.

Because a federal judge issued a gag order in the case, the U.S. attorney in Indiana cannot comment on the case, nor can the FBI. The North Carolina Highway Patrol did confirm that officers assisted with the FBI operation at the Lundeby home on March 5.

“Never in my worst nightmare did I ever think that it would be my own government that I would have to protect my children from,” Lundeby said. “This is the United States, and I feel like I live in a third world country now.”

Lundeby said she does not think this type of case is what the Patriot Act was intended for. Boyce agrees.

“It was to protect the public, but what we need to do is to make sure there are checks and balances to make sure those new laws are not abused,” he said.