How the NSA kills the American Spirit

 "How many of you realize the connection between what's happening with the
Fourth Amendment with the First Amendment?"

If citizens don't have basic privacies—firm protections against the search
and seizure of your private communications,they will be left feeling
"threatened." This will make citizens increasingly concerned "about what they
say, and they do, and they think." It will have the effect of constricting
freedom of expression.

Americans will become careful about what they say that can be misunderstood
or misinterpreted, and then too careful about what they say that can be understood. The inevitable end of surveillance is self-censorship.

Thomas G Hentoff
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The First Amendment, is the most important because all the other ones come
from that. If you don't have free speech you have to be afraid, you lack a
vital part of what it is to be a human being who is free to be who you want
to be." Your own growth as a person will in time be constricted, because we
come to know ourselves by our thoughts.

Justice William Brennan