Our freedoms have already been nibbled away by those in power, who have generations of knowledge as to how to "handle" us. They know how to use fear to motivate us into gladly giving our freedom away, in return for an appearance of security. They know how to divide and conquer us so that we spend more time hating each other than uniting against our tyrants. They know how to use that "infamous boiling frog" to slowly erode freedom through a series of small usurpations. Then, to top it off, they control the schools so that we are conditioned to accept the state and to accept acquiescence as a proper form of patriotism. That is why you have people who say that you shouldn't mind government snooping "if you have nothing to hide." Or who maintain that they haven't lost any rights throughout a lifetime, blithely ignoring a host of encroachments in the form of Patriot Acts, police checkpoints, warrantless searches, and a plethora of regulation from agencies better known by their acronyms and supervised by unelected officials with a lust for power and empire. You have people who seek a leader; people who haven't got the guts to want freedom for themselves, so you can bet that they are more than happy to help the powerful take it from you as well. You have the 47% like the respondents in the BBC World Service poll who are so conditioned to government interference that they see a place for it on the Internet. As long as we who love freedom think that we can rest from vigilance against those who would take it from us, our freedom remains in jeopardy. It's hard work to remain vigilant, especially when those who love power are constantly pushing for more, when we freedom-lovers don't believe in coercion ourselves -- just the right to be left alone.