Reason Article on Kerry's Civil Liberties Record

An interesting article from those wacky libertarians at Reason Magazine that looks at John Kerry's record on civil liberties. It discusses a number of hot button issues, including encryption embargoes and the USA Patriot Act. The following excerpt from the section about encryption key escrow is a little scary:

Responding directly to a column in Wired on encryption that said "trusting the government with your privacy is like having a Peeping Tom install your window blinds," Kerry invoked the Americans killed in 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. "[O]ne would be hard-pressed," he wrote, "to find a single grieving relative of those killed in the bombings of the World Trade Center in New York or the federal building in Oklahoma City who would not have gladly sacrificed a measure of personal privacy if it could have saved a loved one." Change a few words, and the passage could easily fit into Attorney General Ashcroft's infamous speech to the Senate Judiciary Committee in late 2001—the one where he declared, "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberties, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists—for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve."