America's next president had better believe in restoring liberty | Dan Gillmor

Our founders had their flaws, and huge moral blind spots – but on liberty, they were way ahead of their time

As the 2016 presidential election comes slowly into focus, my most fervent wish is for a prominent candidate to give the following speech, or one like it: Thank you for taking a few minutes out of your busy schedules to listen to me. I want you to do more than listen, though; I want you to hear me because nothing I talk about in this campaign is more important than what I'm going to discuss today. The topic is liberty. We are losing our liberty. In some cases, it's being taken away. In others, we are giving it away. If we don't reverse course, and soon, we will lose it entirely. And if that happens, we will lose our republic. Liberty is our civic lifeblood. Our founders had their flaws, and huge moral blind spots. But on liberty, as it has come to be understood, they were way ahead of their time. Every American – everyone – should know by heart a quotation from before the American Revolution. It is widely attributed to Benjamin Franklin, and it goes like this: "Those who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." The constitution limited government's power, by design. Its first 10 amendments, the Bill of Rights, are almost entirely about limiting government's power. They are about choices. For example, as Americans, we choose to permit even offensive speech because we know that when we protect the speech we hate, we are protecting our own free speech. We choose to make it more difficult to convict guilty people of the crimes they've committed, in order to protect the innocent from being convicted of crimes they did not commit. We choose to accept more inconvenience, and more risk, in order to have more liberty. Yet too frequently in our past, and to an alarming degree today, we've chosen to limit liberties in order – we've told ourselves – to have more safety or less trouble. We've tended to correct our worst impulses over time, even if too late for the people whose lives have been harmed or destroyed when those impulses were the law of the land. As Martin Luther King Jr said: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

No precedent

But the current threat to liberty has no precedent.

It starts with expanding and, often, unchecked executive power. Then it adds an inexorable push for total surveillance. Big Brother is expanding his reach directly, spying on our digital communications in almost every form. Cameras are capturing us on city streets, and watching where we drive, and you can be sure that Big Brother wants access to that, too. And he has has co-opted the businesses we patronize, forcing them to turn over information we thought we were sharing only with them. It is all going into massive databases. Soon, if we don't change course, everything will be captured and stored. Everything we do and say will be visible to government, and it will be available retrospectively when someone wants to know what we were saying or doing in the past. Even though the vast majority of people who enter public service are good and honorable, we know from history that the ones who are not will abuse their positions – and that power inevitably corrupts. Surveillance of everyone, all the time, may – may – lessen the risk of one kind of disaster. But it guarantees another kind. We know from all kinds of research that pervasive surveillance is bad for society. It fuels distrust. It chills free speech, the foundation of liberty. Massive surveillance isn't just un-American as a civic matter. By turning people who would be innovators into timid conformists, it is economically damaging as well. When people say, "You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide," ask them if it's fine to install cameras in their homes, not just in th