Adam Serwer on how the ACLU looks to science fiction to prepare for future threats to civil liberties.
In the aftermath of September 11, when the government was expanding its surveillance powers and preparing for an invasion of Afghanistan, the ACLU began gaming out worst-case scenarios of civil-liberties violations. As James Madison once wrote, “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare” — and yet here was America, in the midst of a global war with no defined end. In the summer of 2002, it wasn’t just 9/11 that had the civil-liberties world all shaken up — scientific advancements in the 1990s had led to the first successfully cloned animal, Dolly the sheep. With both science and surveillance on his mind, a policy analyst named Jay Stanley decided that the ACLU needed to be better prepared for threats to liberty that, at the time, existed only in the imagination.