Most Americans have accepted the Bush administration's view that after 9/11 it's a new and more restrictive world out there. Additional security procedures at airports, less privacy for phone calls -- we go along with all sorts of measures aimed at thwarting another terror attack.

Is the sky the limit?

A new program ordered up by Michael McConnell, director of National Intelligence, will give police and others access to some information from the spy satellites that pass above the U.S. along their paths over the globe. The images and data will be employed initially for border security and emergency preparedness; law enforcement uses ("covering both criminal and civil law," according to The Wall Street Journal, which broke the story) are to follow. These spy satellites are able to "see" through cloud cover and even obtain data from inside buildings and bunkers.

They can't, we're assured, tell whether that gent in the street needs a haircut. Not yet, anyway.

Up to now, with a few exceptions for scientific purposes, spy satellites have been used for spying on bad actors abroad. Now they'll focus on us too.

It's hard to swallow, if you think freedom means more than national independence. But it fits a pattern that's not easy to break.

Keeping close tabs

Americans' expectations of personal privacy have been pushed and prodded plenty in recent years, until we hardly know what rights we have. We're videotaped on the streets, radar-timed on the roads, monitored in our calls to companies, told to wear security badges and asked for a phone number even when we pay cash. We're followed by "cookies" in our wanderings around the Web, and when we e-mail or call someone abroad, our words may be intercepted by the government and sorted through by a supercomputer for a revealing word.

Not to mention the trade-offs we make oh-so voluntarily as we trade privacy for convenience -- in the supermarket checkout lane (store cards track personal purchases); in a turnpike's electronic transponder lane (E-ZPass records are being used in divorce cases); and when we sign up for car-tracking services such as OnStar that know if we made the right turn back there.

Now the Feds and local law enforcement will also be looking in on America from low-Earth orbit. As for civil libertarians' concerns, Homeland Security says it will have its lawyers review law enforcement agencies' requests for satellite data before granting them. Does that include review by a court too? The stories are silent.

And even with a nod to civil liberties, the bottom line is that police are winning access to satellites run by the defense and intelligence establishments, satellites intended for quite different purposes than domestic law enforcement ("criminal and civil").

When the eyes have it

At times in our past we've allowed the authorities to curtail liberty at home. It's always been justified on the basis of national security, and always will be. Looking back -- at the Alien and Sedition Acts of the early 1800s and the internments of World War II, for example -- these have not been proud moments. Americans, however, have always pulled back from the brink, back toward liberty.

Now the matter of the spy satellites offers another chance. This program blurs too many civilian-military lines, and sets precedents for ever more acute technological intrusions. Implicitly, it gives officials sweeping new powers (think of life under the satellite "eyes" of some future president you don't think much of). It unbalances the equation between security and liberty. It goes too far.

Are we still Americans that the men who drafted and ratified the Bill of Rights would recognize? Pushed, prodded and spied on from space, we have to wonder.