I think the Franklin quote is entirely relevant. What is at the core of it is that freedoms are more important than my or your life. That still stands.
I don't buy the argument that times are different. Not only have airplanes been used in only one single incidence (still statistically the safest form of travel!) but they will not likely be used again - and it has nothing to do with airport security.
There's a reason that we have a constitution strictly against such things that state:
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Restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and association; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications; and warrants for house searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.
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Again, that's not the PATRIOT Act. That's the decree, “For the Protection of the People and the State,” yet another thing that lead up to Nazi Germany.
From
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:
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The overwhelming majority of Germans did not seem to mind that their personal freedom had been taken away, that so much of culture had been destroyed and replaced with a mindless barbarism, or that their life and work had become regimented to a degree never before experienced even by a people accustomed for generations to a great deal of regimentation.... The Nazi terror in the early years affected the lives of relatively few Germans and a newly arrived observer was somewhat surprised to see that the people of this country did not seem to feel that they were being cowed.... On the contrary, they supported it with genuine enthusiasm. Somehow it imbued them with a new hope and a new confidence and an astonishing faith in the future of their country.
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Accounting for the different social culture, this sounds much like America today, sadly. Bush is no Hitler, and there are no concentration camps. But one of the biggest errors we, as humans, make over and over again is thinking than when history repeats itself it will look just like the last time.
There's a reason the founding fathers felt that our freedom of a society was more important than our collective "security." And if we're not careful, we may head down a new, 21st century path towards totalitarianism. Only, this time, it will not be overt - not when politicians realize the power of the media to spin the truth. Not when the American people are ripe for being told that the LOSS of their liberties is, in itself, the liberty of security. We live in an age of gentle coersion - and it only takes one look into Art's thread "Mass Media Mind Control" to see how far-reaching and perverse it is. The term "sheeple" didn't come out of nowhere.
The suspension of liberties, for ANY purpose, is never acceptable, and it is only ever the beginning of the permanent destruction of them.