I write a column about punk music, and yesterday I did some online shopping and research. I bought a cd called "13 Point Plan to Destroy America" by an early-nineties joke band called "The Nation of Ulysses." The band's site describes them as "a violent and rejectionist group" whose goal is to "wreck society by destroying its institutions and the men who serve them." Other materials purport to link the Nation of Ulysses to Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah.

Now all this seems less funny since 9.11. But I got to wondering: who's watching? Is it possible that I just set off various keyword searches at the National Security Administration? Supposing that Tom Ridge has any underlings, did I suddenly come to their attention?

Well perhaps not. But more to the point: who cares? Since the terrorist attacks, we seem willing to trade liberty for security in a fairly large way. The Federal government has instituted a number of measures that it says are aimed at terrorists, including the indefinite detention of young Arab men without charge, secret trial by military tribunal, and much increased powers of domestic surveillance. According to various polls, almost 90% of Americans support the measures.

But in our fear, we may be rushing to compromise the freedom we're supposedly defending. Unity and patriotism are sweet, especially as we emerge from an era of snarling partisanship during the Clinton years. But unity and patriotism have a dark side, and it is hard to see what anti-civil-liberties legislation would not be popular at the moment, especially if it seems to be aimed at "terrorists" or people with Arab names, two categories which seem in the contemporary mind to be closely linked if not identical.

But the power of surveillance cannot be limited to terrorists because you need to use it to find out who the terrorists are. That's one reason that it's more likely than it was a year ago that you are yourself, today, under some degree of government surveillance. And the quasi-legal-detentions and trials that have been instituted cannot be limited to terrorists because the fact that someone is a terrorist is exactly what you need a trial to prove.

It's easy to think that if you do nothing wrong - especially if you're white and native-born - nothing can happen to you. And it will go on being easy to think that forever, unless something really does happen to you and you find yourself in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare with no appeal.

Freedom has a variety of enemies: The fascists, who merged the army and the state. The communists, who merged the state and the economy. The current incarnation of both master and slave is the fanatic, who would merge the state and the religion, and convert or destroy those whose belief differs from his own.

So there are enemies of freedom who wear funny mustaches or turbans. But there are enemies of freedom who wear business suits and neutral expressions. There are enemies of freedom who spout propaganda. But there are enemies of freedom with whom it would be comfortable to have lunch and talk sports. There are enemies of freedom who look alien, who have a weird squiggly expression in their eyes. And then there are enemies of freedom who look like Little League coaches.

Attorney General John Ashcroft is such a man. I am not, not, not equating him with Hitler or bin Laden. But it is precisely his normalcy in our world and his reassuring presence that help him to undermine the freedoms for which we're supposedly fighting. Ashcroft is not a monster; he regards himself as an advocate of democracy, and that claim is not bizarre.

Nevertheless, if ever this particular crisis is over, we may wake to find that under his auspices the Federal government has accrued new powers and resources that have a very direct bearing on our freedoms of movement, thought, expression, assembly, petition, due process, and the rest of the rights that the country was founded to protect.

It is likely that when we wake from the nightmare of terror, there will be whole new departments of the federal government and new arms of the old ones dedicated to monitoring your movements, your opinions, your purchases.

The actions of these bodies will be largely unknown because they will be secret. Surveillance, for example, cannot be effective if the person on whom it is imposed knows she is being watched. Already, we do not know exactly how many people are being detained, or why they are being detained. We do not even know how many of them are American citizens and how many are foreign nationals.

And once these new bureaucracies are established, it is extremely unlikely that they will ever be abolished. I wonder, in fact, whether you can think of an agency or two of the United States government that *has* been abolished, in our history.

Some limits on freedom will be - and already are - intruding into our lives in a pretty obvious way: for example, the increased security at airports. That is a limitation that I think we can all understand and reconcile ourselves to.

But freedom can be eroded massively and invisibly. Increased security at airports is inconvenient. Secret bureaucracies for monitoring citizens and punishing them constitute the profound undermining of the Constitution.

Your freedom can be compromised even if you are never physically restrained. If you do not know at any given moment whether you are being watched and whether, if you are, you could be punished for what you do or say, you will limit your own expression: you become the jailer of your self. If there are ideas that we agree should not be spoken, and words that set off search engines at a large building outside of DC, there are places we will never go in our conversations and in our heads.

Of course, maybe you do not want to use the word "jihad," or explore Islam, or check out a militia meeting, or find out about the ideas of Rabbi Meyer Kahane. There are many reasons people might want to do these things, but if you do, it is much likelier now that people with a lot more power than you have are going to know what you're doing.

But whether you do or not, your freedom has been limited. Good Aryan people who enthusiastically supported Hitler felt perfectly free in fascist Germany. But they were not free, as they would soon have found out if they harbored a Jewish friend, or bought a book about Zionism, or voted the wrong way. After the Allied victory, many Germans were shocked to find that they had not been free the whole while.

This is not Germany, and Ashcroft is not Adolf. But it is always good to remember how these things happen, and it always good to fight for freedom, whether it's Tora Bora or Ephrata.

Perhaps you're wondering about the Nation of Ulysses. Their charismatic leader Ian Svevonious's next career move after jihad was "psychedelic lounge music." I wonder whether anyone's listening.