In 1759, Ben Franklin may or may not have written "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." There's some dispute over whether he penned those lines or borrowed them for a publication. But there's no disputing that this concept of individual liberty balanced with collective security was at the very foundation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

The balancing act between essential liberties and collective security has been more than put to the test in post-9/11 America, and the balance has most definitely shifted away from personal liberty. Consider this story told by a border agent at a meeting of 200 residents in Washington's San Juan Islands.

He was there to explain why the federal government is doing citizenship checks on domestic ferry runs. But near the end, while trying to convince the skeptical audience that the point is to root out terrorists, not fish for wrongdoing among the citizenry, deputy chief Joe Giuliano let loose with a tale straight out of "Dr. Strangelove."

It turns out the feds have been monitoring Interstate 5 for nuclear "dirty bombs." They do it with radiation detectors so sensitive it led to the following incident.

"Vehicle goes by at 70 miles per hour," Giuliano told the crowd. "Agent is in the median, a good 80 feet away from the traffic. Signal went off and identified an isotope [in the passing car]."

The agent raced after the car, pulling it over not far from the monitoring spot (near the Bow-Edison exit, 18 miles south of Bellingham). The agent questioned the driver, then did a cursory search of the car, Giuliano said.

Did he find a nuke?

"Turned out to be a cat with cancer that had undergone a radiological treatment three days earlier" Giuliano said.

He added: "That's the type of technology we have that's going on in the background. You don't see it. If I hadn't told you about it, you'd never know it was there."

The border agent went on to point out that they've caught two would-be terrorists at the Blaine border region, one in 1997 and one in 1999. What wasn't highlighted in that exchange was that this was during the Clinton administration. That the pre-9/11, pre-PATRIOT Act security measures and protocols that were in effect then were perfectly adequate to detect and to apprehend these men.

So how does finding a radioactive cat at 70 mph and from 80 feet away make us safer? And what exactly else is "going on in the background" that we don't see and don't know about? Last week, I wrote about the government's implementation of the Total Information Awareness program, a program that had been banned by Congress, but that the Pentagon implemented anyway.

Huge amounts of data--e-mail information (sender, recipient, subject line, time stamp), Internet searches (both conducted searches and sites visited), both wired and wireless phone calls (incoming and outgoing, as well as location and duration), financial records (credit card activity, wire transfers, bank account information), and tracking information from the TSA--are being swept up by the NSA and monitored for suspicious patterns.

The good news since last week, as smintheus reported, is that on one facet in this Total Information Awareness Surveillance Society, Gov. Brian Schweitzer made the feds blink. Key to their plans to keep track of us was Real ID, the state government-issued ID card that would replace our driver's license with a national ID card that would have a chip including, at a minimum, name, birth date, sex, ID number, a digital photograph, address, and a "common machine-readable technology" that would allow the data to be shared in federal databases--the ones that already store all that other data being picked up by the TIA programs. Schweitzer said "no," the feds said, "ok."

Expect Montana's victory on Real ID to encourage the other hold-out states, including Maine, South Carolina, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma to flat-out reject the program, and other states to join the movement. Idaho has already made steps in that direction with the state House unanimously rejecting the program. Now states like Alaska and the powerhouse state of California to join in.

Maybe the states can do what our Congress has failed at in the past seven years--say "no" to an administration that would happily sacrifice our Essential Liberty's for the illusion of safety.