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The issue for me isn't the fear that the government will fall into the hands of the corrupt and the power-hungry. Look around! No point in being afraid of that in the future--that's the present! And I don't mean that in a partisan way; my guys are just as bad as theirs, as far as that's concerned. They don't happen to be the ones with their hands on the wheel at the moment, but I don't have any illusion that it would be all that different if they were.
The concern for me is the slippery-slope nature of the thing. It's not a mistake that the word "erosion" is used to describe what's happening to American civil liberties. Each incremental step doesn't look like much, until one day you wake up and find your entire life regulated in the name of "safety".
One great example of this is the nation of Israel. Israelis live with constant security checkpoints, ID examination, metal detectors at every public building... And they're still getting blown up left and right. Literally not two weeks go by without something in Jerusalem getting bombed. We don't even hear about it in the US anymore unless some exceptionally large number of people get blown up. So what have they gotten? All these intrusions into their lives haven't bought them any real safety, and it has cost them the freedom to move around unmolested and unexamined.
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