Destroying our freedoms in the name of security

I came across this story yesterday, but didn't get a chance to post about it.  The State of Arizona is seizing people's wire transfers.  If you want to get your money back, you have to prove you are innocent of smuggling illegal aliens into the country:

In a campaign to choke off smugglers’ finances, the Arizona attorney general in recent years has periodically seized money wired in large amounts from people outside Arizona, and even some money sent from other states to Mexico.

The authorities have amassed $17 million in four years from suspect transfers, singling out those exceeding $500 and believed to be sent as payments to smugglers who have just transported people or drugs into Arizona, the busiest illegal crossing area on the border.

But the effort has come under legal attack, first from Western Union, which handles most of the transactions, and now through a federal lawsuit filed yesterday in Phoenix by three legal immigrants and an immigrant advocacy group representing the immigrants. They say their transactions are legal and have been caught up in the campaign of the attorney general, Terry Goddard.

“They just decided it was a lot easier to sweep everybody on in and make people prove their innocence,” Matthew J. Piers, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, said at a news conference in Chicago, where the advocacy group is based. “In this country, we do it the other way around.”

This is one more instance of how law enforcement is using its long arm to invade our freedoms and our privacy while arguing that it is necessary to protect the country (in this case from illegal aliens).  As Glenn Greenwald said yesterday, it can be argued that any limits of any kind placed on law enforcement officials tend to reduce the effectiveness of law enforcement.  Hence, if the most important goal is to protect our country from law breakers, it could be argued that there should be no limits whatsoever on law enforcement officials. 

That's what the Bush administration has been arguing.  Let's do away with messy trials and habeas corpus and laws against torture and all that kind of thing.  Those just tie the hands and restrict the effectiveness of those trying to protect us.  Let's do away with freedom of speech and press.  It's too messy, and our enemies might learn something from us if we let people speak their minds. 

Of course, it's always been obvious that law enforcement might be more effective if restrictions on it were removed, but the whole thrust of our Constitution and the Bill of Rights is that we accept some loss of our safety from criminals and enemies in order to better guarantee our freedom from being enslaved by a despotic government of our own.

Washington has set the tone, but now Arizona and others are following the Bush lead and destroying the very basis of our freedoms.