But the issue goes beyond this Attorney General and this White House. In a time of amorphous danger and almost fiendishly unidentifiable enemies, is it possible to hold the line on the indivisibility of freedom? How difficult is it to create a trumped-up concern about public safety, which then allows government officials to become capricious and vindictive with the powers that they seize? And what sort of chance is there that these powers would ever be enforced with any consistency or even any real understanding of the significance of arguments and ideas? Once governments get the hang of it redefining and limiting who has the right to say what is there any guarantee that they wont decide that they like it altogether too much?