Cost of preserving freedom

James Adams, 2nd President of USA

• Freedom is not free. You will pay the price to preserve it.
• John Adams, the second president of USA, he wrote, April 26, 1777: “Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it.”
• Theodore Roosevelt wrote in a preface: “No people can be really great unless they possess heroic virtues. America will cease to be a great nation whenever her young men cease to possess energy, daring, and endurance, as well as the wish and the power to fight the nation’s foes. He must also be able and willing to stand up for his own rights and those of his country against all comers resisting either malice domestic or foreign levy.”
• Henry Cabot Lodge warned the U.S. Senate, Aug. 12, 1919: “The United States is the world’s best hope, but if you fetter her in the interests and quarrels of other nations, you will endanger her very existence. Leave her to march freely through the centuries to come strong, generous, and confident. Beware how you trifle with your marvelous inheritance; this great land of ordered liberty. For if we stumble and fall, freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin.”
• Since 2001, there have been a steady erosion of civil liberties even in countries that regard themselves as liberty's champions. Arbitrary arrest, indefinite detention without trial, suspension of habeas corpus, even torture - who would have thought such things possible? Governments argue that desperate times demand such remedies. They face a murderous new enemy who lurks in the shadows, will stop at nothing and seeks chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. This renders the old rules and freedoms out of date. There is always a great force in such arguments. This is how governments through the ages have justified grabbing repressive new powers. 
• During the second world war the democracies spied on their own citizens, imposed censorship and used torture to extract information. America interned its entire Japanese-American population, a decision now seen to have been a cruel mistake.
• The democracies chose by and large not to let it change the sort of societies which was a wise choice not only because of the freedom it bestowed on people in the West during those decades, but also because the West's freedoms became one of the most potent weapons in its struggle against its totalitarian foes.
• War against terrorism is not a war at all. Although a real threat exists, to let security trump liberty in every case would corrode the civilised world's sense of what it is and wants to be.
• Obnoxious measures do not help the fight against terrorism anyway. 
• It is tempting to let secret policemen spy on citizens, detain them without trial and use torture to extract information makes it easier to foil terrorist plots. 
• What you would do with a terrorist who knew the location of a ticking nuclear bomb. Logic says you would torture one man to save hundreds of thousands of lives, and so you would. But this a fictional dilemma. Policemen are seldom sure whether the many suspects they want to torture know of any plot, or how many lives might be at stake. All that is certain is that the logic of the ticking bomb leads down a slippery slope where the state is licensed in the name of the greater good to trample on the hard-won rights of any one and therefore all of its citizens.
• Human rights are part of what it means to be civilised. Locking up suspected terrorists, potential murderers, rapists and pedophiles before they commit crimes would probably make society safer. Dozens of plots may have been foiled and thousands of lives saved as a result of some of the unsavory practices now being employed in the name of fighting terrorism. 
• Dropping such practices in order to preserve freedom may cost many lives. So be it.

Our government in the name of bringing tax evaders to books forcibly linking everybody's accounts and transactions with Aadhaar, without secure network and robust privacy laws, is gross violation of citizens privacy rights, freedom and liberties guaranteed by constitution. To catch a thief undermining citizen's privacy rights is nonsense. This tantamount to peeping into bedrooms of each and every citizen which is an unacceptable nonsense. Preservation of citizen's rights, freedom and liberties takes precedence over all other government's activities. Govt must explore other avenues to go after tax evaders and must stop this nonsensical Aadhaar related violation of privacy rights.