Rod Watson, a columnist for the Buffalo News gets it. From his column: Never happen here? Guess what — it has

As one of its many shifting rationales for starting a war, the Bush administration constantly reminded Americans about the freedoms we take for granted.

That argument will be much less compelling next time for one simple reason: We won’t have nearly as many freedoms left once this bunch leaves office.

The outrageous new policy of seizing electronic devices at the Peace Bridge and other crossings purely on the whim of a border agent is just the latest example of our government doing to us what we’d fight to the death to prevent a foreign power from doing.

Think about it: No warrant. No probable cause. No judge.

Just a vague suspicion —” real or fabricated —” is pretext enough to seize your laptop, cell phone or iPod and all of the personal or business-related information in it. A local entrepreneur’s trade secrets, a journalist’s confidential information from a whistle-blower, your private medical records —” all fair game for any snooping government agent.

No appeal. No ability to challenge it. And no idea when, or if, you’ll ever get it back.

If you walked into a room in the midst of a discussion of this abuse, the reaction would be, —Wow, I’m sure glad I live in America, where nothing like that could happen.— It’s the kind of story that, when it occurs in other countries, prompts U.S. leaders to wag their fingers.

In the last few years, slowly, silently, we’ve become those other countries.

While there have been protests as the administration’s oil buddies rob consumers to rake in record profits, we’ve been robbed of something much more precious with hardly a whimper…

Read the rest. It’s worth time in reflection because look at the next step. From today’s Washington Post: U.S. May Ease Police Spy Rules. More Federal Intelligence Changes Planned

The Justice Department has proposed a new domestic spying measure that would make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans, share the sensitive data with federal agencies and retain it for at least 10 years.

The proposed changes would revise the federal government’s rules for police intelligence-gathering for the first time since 1993 and would apply to any of the nation’s 18,000 state and local police agencies that receive roughly $1.6 billion each year in federal grants.

Quietly unveiled late last month, the proposal is part of a flurry of domestic intelligence changes issued and planned by the Bush administration in its waning months. They include a recent executive order that guides the reorganization of federal spy agencies and a pending Justice Department overhaul of FBI procedures for gathering intelligence and investigating terrorism cases within U.S. borders.

Taken together, critics in Congress and elsewhere say, the moves are intended to lock in policies for Bush’s successor and to enshrine controversial post-Sept. 11 approaches that some say have fed the greatest expansion of executive authority since the Watergate era…

Funny they should mention Watergate. Of course that’s scarry to a lot of folks because it stood their trust of government on its head. At the time of Watergate Congress and the Press stood against an abusive Executive. They stood to defend core principals. That doesn’t happen so much anymore. In fact, it is non-existent. This is far scarier and, in comparison, Watergate was limited to a proverbial “Keystone Kop” affair through checks-and-balances.

These measures are not just an abuse of “Executive” authority, but a steady movement toward the authority of dictators. It is simply a license to do whatever the person in charge pleases without accountability.