Truth.

LA Times: why you should care about wiretapping - Don't Tase Me, Bro!:

"It's tempting to say, 'I'm not a terrorist, so the government should be given whatever powers it needs.' ...But in actual point of fact, when the government is allowed to spy on people without oversight, history shows us that it always uses these tools to suppress dissent.

Governments aren't inherently evil, and on the record, I don't even think the present Administration is evil. But government is made of fallible human beings, and it's all too easy for human beings to see themselves as necessary for the good of the nation, and to see all their enemies as a threat to the nation. But when their 'enemies' include their political foes, it gets tough to draw that line -- and the result is fiascoes like Watergate and, now, probably, the Bush Administration's adventures in crime even before 9/11."