Calls For Police State Meet With Deafening Silence From Libertarians

I knew that it was a matter of time that someone would take the lesson from the bumbling terror cell plots in the UK that we need to look at everyone continually at every waking moment. Little surprise that it was Joe Lieberman (Lieberman - CT), who advocated for a police state this morning on ABC:

Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), the chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, said Sunday he wants to “more widely” use surveillance cameras across the country.

“The Brits have got something smart going in England, and it was part of why I believe they were able to so quickly apprehend suspects in the terrorist acts over the weekend, and that is they have cameras all over London and other of their major cities,” Lieberman said.

“I think it’s just common sense to do that here much more widely,” he added. “And of course, we can do it without compromising anybody’s real privacy.”

Before you laugh and scoff that this is the work of a crackpot, remember that this is the Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee in the Senate.

Look, Britain's CCTV did not stop any terror attack, quick thinking by law enforcement combined with embarrassingly little knowledge of science on the part of the would-be bombers did. They simply don't prevent crime, and that's not even their object. It couldn't possibly be their object unless you wanted to hire a million or so people to be official government watchers. Detection and prosecution is their object, and in this case, I think the British were able to apprehend people in Glasgow, for example, because the guy ran out of the car on fire. The British have grown more comfortable with having 4 million CCTV cameras in their country, though there are critics. In American, we have a little thing called the Fourth Amendment which would potentially disallow unreasonable searches. It's ingrained in the American character to be mindful of their own privacy and resist efforts to take it away. So calling for a "Big Brother" setup in America is fairly nutty and potentially illegal. In other words, perfect for someone like Lieberman to call for.

You would think that this would alarm the libertarians that populate the Republican Party and particularly the conservative blogosphere. But we've learned over the past several years that, as long as you're taking away civil liberties in the name of fighting really dumb terrorists, libertarians will nod in assent or mumble uncomfortably about something else, like how that guy in line at the convenience store with the turban looked a little suspicious. Outside of this mild criticism at RedState, pretty much nobody on the right has anything to say about the chair of the Senate committee on Homeland Security calling for blanketing the country with surveillance cameras. This includes the Ole Perfesser, who yesterday got all hyped up about "Big Brother" scanning your driver's license when you buy beer, and who in the past has waged a one-man jihad against traffic cameras. Somehow, Joe Lieberman openly pining for CCTV nationwide isn't rousing much interest. Of course, it has nothing to do with robots, so maybe that's to be expected.

We have a continuing threat from terrorism (in many ways due to our bungling in international relation), but not one that requires the stripping of all of our civil liberties enshrined in the fabric of this republic. There used to be a lot of constitutionalists that understood that. Not these days, because they've become so shell-shocked and scared from 9/11 PTSD that they are willing to gladly surrender to a de facto police state in America.