Have any of you ever heard of the right of dissent from the point of view/opinion/policies of the government?

That is the danger to civil liberties. If you want to change something through the conventional political process in the US, you have constitutionally protected means of disagreeing with and changing government policy, laws, even the Constitution itself. Citizen groups can and do exercise those rights all the time in the US.

However, governments being what governments are, even in democracies where those rights of political dissent are protected, governments go after political dissenters illegally, and go to extraordinary lengths to silence them.

That is what the McCarthy era was all about. The COINTELPRO spy ring which targeted civil rights and anti-war activists in the 1950s and 1960s,in violation of many people's civil and constitutional rights (like Martin Luther King).

As someone has already pointed out, these draconian laws will do nothing to prevent domestic terrorism, and certainly won't make a dent in organized crime. So why do we need these laws?

Simple. To silence political dissent, the same way the government attempted to silence it during the McCarthy era. The new Office of Homeland Security is yesterday's House UnAmerican Activities Committee.

It looks to me as if Mudcat is a forum of pretty conservative people who aren't very politically aware of what is going on in the world, or in the US.

The laws being railroaded through Congress right now are very dangerous to our nation's values and way of life. If you don't believe those rights constitutionally guaranteed you in the Bill of Rights to be all that important because you don't think you'll be harmed by their suspension, you might want to do a bit of history reading, just to find out what will happen when the FBI come to your door for you or a loved one.