The Economist has a pretty evenhanded rundown on the administration’s various attacks on our civil liberties/efforts to improve national security in the wake of the September 11 attacks. A lot of people believe that Bush and Ashcroft are attempting to turn the US into some sort of dictatorship, I’m not one of them. However, I believe that all of the steps that have been taken need to be evaluated as a whole, and that we need to consider how they might be misused by someone with good intentions and poor judgement, or someone who flat out has bad intentions. If we don’t give the government the tools to legally monitor and dominate our lives, it’s less likely that it will do so.