Columnist Jeff German: Freedom dying, just to be safe

Tuesday, June 22, 2004 | 10:59 a.m.

On his Web site, Larry "Dudley" Hiibel has a quote from Benjamin Franklin that reads:

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Hiibel is the Winnemucca rancher who lost a well-publicized national fight Monday to preserve his constitutional rights to privacy.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, refused to overturn his misdemeanor conviction and $250 fine for not identifying himself during an encounter with a deputy sheriff in 2000. The deputy had suspected Hiibel was involved in a domestic dispute with his 17-year-old daughter.

The high court's ruling is just the latest in a series of blows to civil liberties in this country since Sept. 11.

Congress, state legislatures and the courts all have an attitude that being at war with terrorists means we have to give broad investigative authority to lawmen at the expense of the freedoms we enjoy so much. And lawmen are too willingly exploiting this sentiment.

The U.S. Justice Department doesn't think twice now about using a loophole in the post-Sept. 11 USA Patriot Act to investigate non-terrorism cases. FBI agents last October made Patriot Act requests for financial information on the targets of a Las Vegas political corruption probe.

Days before the big New Year's Eve bash on the Strip, agents on the lookout for terrorists took further advantage of their expanded powers. They obtained customer lists from Las Vegas hotels, airlines and car rental agencies simply by issuing administrative subpoenas that didn't require judicial approval. None of the businesses complained, even though it was an intrusion on the privacy of tens of thousands of tourists.

When it came time for the New Year's Eve festivities, Metro Police, without warrants, randomly searched the backpacks of partygoers on the barricaded Strip -- again in the name of homeland security. And few people questioned its legality.

Hiibel isn't a terrorist. But in its decision the high court upheld a 4-3 Nevada Supreme Court opinion in December 2002 that justified his conviction in part on grounds that police need broader powers in today's extraordinary anti-terrorism climate.

The Nevada justices said officers should have the ability to identify suspicious persons they detain to avoid letting terrorists slip through their fingers. If the questions the cops ask infringe on our constitutional rights to be left alone, tough luck.

The U.S. Supreme Court didn't dispute that opinion.

As a result, the Fifth Amendment right of all Americans to remain silent doesn't mean as much today as it did last week. We now can be charged with a crime for not giving an officer our name -- for literally doing nothing.

To Allen Lichtenstein, general counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, that's a "big step in the wrong direction" that is sure to leave the door open for further erosion of the principles that founded this country.

I wonder what we'll have to give up the next time we're stopped by a cop. Where we live? The names of our family members? How much we have in our bank accounts? What we had for dinner the night before?

Suddenly, I have this ugly feeling that the nation's highest court has posed a bigger threat to our liberty than the terrorists we're fighting.