Some rights are more basic than others, Tom. You obsess over money and property and so you think that they're the most important thing, but they are not primary rights, they are secondary rights. The right to privacy is a primary right whose existence makes secondary rights possible.

The right to privacy is inferred from several rights protected by the Constitution, chief among them the right to freedom of expression. Freedom of speech is, in my view, the most basic right, because you must be able to speak out to protect all other rights, including your right to money and property. Any aspiring tyranny's first move is necessarily the limitation of freedom of speech in order to grant itself more freedom of action without opposition.

Section 215 is in fact an attack on the basic right to property and wealth because it attacks the right to privacy. Information and ideas are no less property because they're intangible. Ideas locked inside your head cannot create wealth; they must be communicated to others to have commercial value and create wealth.

It's broader than the right to do business, of course. Do you understand that the right to privacy is in essence a property right? It says that you own your thoughts and information about yourself, and you alone have the right to give it to others. It says that when you communicate with another person, you are engaging in a private transaction in which the parties own the information communicated, and have the right to decide who has access to that communication.

We shouldn't be concerned only with Section 215. One chilling provision of "Patriot" Act II that's conceptually similar to 215 grants government agents at-will power to pull your credit report. You may be blase about the government pulling your library and video rental records, but how do you like the power to dig into your financial records? Connect the dots to "Total Information Awareness" and you see that the idea is to integrate your private financial information into a massive government database that government functionaries can browse at a whim. Do you think that the IRS won't eventually get access to that database too as a result of "mission creep"?

Another aspect of all this is Ashcroft himself. He's an outspoken social conservative and religious fundamentalist. We're supposed to be reassured because he took an oath to obey the law, and the laws are supposed to restrain his power to impose his views on the rest of us. But he's trying to change the laws to grant himself more power! Among the powers he already has is to monitor the social aspect of our lives, including what we choose to read and the movies we choose to view; and he wants the power to dig even deeper. Isn't that a red flag even to you?

No, I don't trust Ashcroft, and I trust him less when I see him lobbying for broader powers. No soothing "trust our Glorious Leaders, they have our best interest at heart" from Bush partisans has the power to remove that distrust. The danger is real.