Are you willing to give up liberty to be safe? This is a question that I'm frequently asked. It is, however, a misleading question since it assumes that we live in a world where liberty and safety are direct trade-offs - that we necessarily become safer when we give up our liberty.

This false choice between safety and liberty has been offered by the Administration to justify its post-9/11 policies that undermine civil liberties. But the PATRIOT Act and related executive branch directives strip away fundamental rights of free speech, privacy and due process without making us any safer. They offer instead what I prefer to call: "pretend security."

If security really mattered, fewer testers and college kids would be able to sneak weapons onto airliners.
If security were the focus, we would have reinforced cockpit doors and effective screening of luggage on airplanes.
If security were the top priority, our leaders would focus on fixing the problems detailed in the 900-page "Report of the Joint Inquiry into the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001" by the House and Senate Select Committees on Intelligence.

It seems that the government had within its grasp information that it could have used to deter the attacks of 9/11. In fact, it was overwhelmed with information. But it lacked the ability to translate millions of hours of captured conversations, some of which included precise warnings, at a time when the FBI had only 40 Arabic speakers. Our intelligence agencies lacked the ability to analyze and act on that information in a timely fashion.

Rather than focus on measures that might enhance our security, however, the Administration is now determined to keep the full story about its pre 9/11 failings out of the hands of the National Commission on the Terrorist Attacks, frustrating the families who lost loved ones in the attacks. Instead, it has been intent on seizing more power to conduct domestic surveillance and bypass judicial review of its actions.

Underpinning the Administration's approach are two propositions: that more information is better information, and that unchecked power in the hands of the government will necessarily make us safer. Both assumptions are highly questionable.

Consider, for example, Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act. It permits the government to seize your records from third parties without telling you, including your library reading lists, your medical and mental health records, your banking information, and your Internet Service Provider records. To make matters worse, Section 215 makes it a crime for the librarian, health care provider, bank or ISP to tell you that your records have been seized.

After the ACLU filed a constitutional challenge to Section 215, US Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that the Justice Department had never actually used Section 215 to seize a library patron's books. This admission, of course, suggests what most of us knew all along: that giving the government access to your reading habits does not make you any safer. Only less free.

The false liberty-versus-safety dichotomy arises again when the government targets Muslims and people of Arab and South Asian descent on the basis of their ethnic and religious background. Under the Special Registration program instituted last year, more than 110,000 men ages 16 and older from 25 Middle Eastern and Muslim countries were required to report to the Immigration offices for photographing, fingerprinting, and interviews. What is less well known - because it has been so poorly publicized, including to the affected communities - is that these same men are required to register once again this year. They must do so within 10 days of the anniversary of their original registration date or else face criminal prosecution and deportation.

Although the government claims that the Special Registration program is a way to track men from countries with an active al-Qaeda presence, it is hard to imagine that anyone who intended to launch a terrorist attack would show up to be photographed and fingerprinted. The people who report for registration are those who seek to comply with the law. Special Registration does not make use safer.

Moreover, racial and ethnic profiling has been shown to be a failed law enforcement technique. Profiling did not work in the War on Drugs and it won't work in the War on Terror. If law enforcement focuses on race, ethnicity, or religion, terrorists who don't fit the profile will slip underneath their radar.

By targeting entire ethnic and religious communities, the government has revived the "guilt by association" approach to law enforcement that was used during two of the low points of our history -- the McCarthy black-listing era and the internment of the Japanese. Now, once again, our government would condemn thousands of people because of who they are, not what they have done, in the process violating fundamental notions of free speech, association, due process and equal protection.

This is bad law enforcement. Guilt by association silences entire communities and individuals who might, by dint of language, kinship, or other affiliations, have information that could be used to prevent another attack. Why not adopt a community policing model that would enable those with potentially useful information to come forward without fear that they would be "detained" as material witnesses or locked up for immigration violations?

History teaches that in times of national insecurity, there is a tendency to sacrifice Constitutional protections in the name of national security. This is our moment in history. So the next time someone asks you whether you are willing to sacrifice freedom in the name of security, ask them a few questions of your own.

Which rights are we being asked to give up and who decides? What is the connection to our security? What safeguards are in place to prevent abuse? And who among us would abandon this country's hard-won freedoms for a mere illusion of safety?